Here are some tips to help you, and others in general...
If you can tell the difference between the colors when you see them side by side, a card with a red square and a green square might be useful for you.
Hydrogen peroxide will foam when it comes in contact with blood, the foam is white. It is inexpensive, especially compared to the blood tracking sprays that have a dye in them, and it works.
For night tracking, using a Coleman lantern with the liquid gas (white gas) rather than the canisters (propane or isobutane) is said to show blood really well. The canister fuel does not give of the same frequency of light and does not work as well.
Blood trailing dogs are becoming more and more popular and many states allow their use for after the shot to find game animals.
Learn the tricks to TRAILING an animal rather than BLOOD TRAILING and animal. The blood trail can eventually give out or become sporadic, so lean to look for other signs of where the animal went.
~ Broken spider webs indicate something came through there that was as least as tall as the spider web was off the ground.
~ Turned over leaves are a sign that something came through that way.
~ Look for blood on the leaves at the animals chest height, and not just on the ground.
~ Look at the color of the blood on your arrow or on the ground near where it was shot. Greenish tells you it was in the paunch/gut. Dark red indicates a liver hit. Frothy (bubbles) indicates a lung hit.
~ Learn what color and texture hair is found on each part of the animal you are hunting. Since hair will be cut off where the bullet or arrow enters you will have an idea of where you hit the animal.
~ Get down on your knees and put your head down near the ground. From this angle/perspective it is much easier to see where something walked.
~ Look for ants and spiders and other insects. They are attracted to blood and will feed on it.
~ Put a highly visible flag/tape at each location of blood or other sign. If you look along the path of the flags it will help you see the direction the animal is taking, especially if it is circling back on itself.
~ Always look way ahead of yourself for the animal. You want to be able to see it before it sees you (if possible) and gets up and moves again. So, at each bit of sign you should flag it, then look all around you as far as you can to see if you can see any sign of the animal (the whole animal, antler tips, an ear, just like you do when scouting).
~ Look under brush or in/behind blowdowns or other places along the way that it might be hiding. I once found an entire skeleton of a six point buck under the brush along a cornfield. Obviously someone didn't spend enough time looking for it the year before.
~ Buy a book or take a course on tracking to learn more tricks and get some practical experience at using them.
Hope this helps,
Larry
