Books on tracking?

[khart_6882]

I’d really like to improve my tracking skills, which are pretty much nil unless it’s snowy or muddy. In which case I can basically identify if it was a buck/bull, the direction it was traveling, and some sort of guess on how recent the track was made. So I’d really like to try and get better at it before scouting season really kicks off.

Anyone have any good book recommendations? There’s a ton of them on Amazon but it’s hard to judge the reviews without knowing the people writing them. Some of the ones I was looking at so far were

Practical Tracking: A Guide to Following Footprints and Finding Animals

Hunting Big Woods Bucks: Secrets of Tracking and Stalking Whitetails

How to Bag the Biggest Buck of Your Life by Larry Benoit

I realize most of the hunting related tracking books are whitetail oriented but I do the vast majority of my muley hunting in the timber so I’d imagine a fair amount of the tactics would be universal.


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[*zap*]

try searching for man tracking books..

 

[khart_6882]

try searching for man tracking books..

I feel like that would get some results I don’t want to see…especially an image search


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[*zap*]

well, I have an excellent book on man tracking but I am not sure of the title. Better than an animal tracking book for general tracking.

 

[3325]

Stay away from Tom Brown Jr. unless you want a big dose of Native American mysticism and philosophy mixed in with tracking instruction. For practical application, you can’t go wrong with the old time Border Patrol trackers.

Recommend:

Tracking: A Blueprint For Learning How by Jack Kearney

Tracker by Joel Hardin

Fundamentals of Mantracking by Ab Taylor

Kearney, Hardin, and Taylor are three names legendary in the history of Border Patrol trackers.

 

[slatty]

The whitetail books by the benoits are good. Their program is walking down deer by tracking, and they're very good at it. I haven't been able to adapt that to thickly timbered steep mountain country where I live (not saying it can't work).

Robby Denning's book on hunting big mule deer has some good info as well, specifically on mule deer.

 

[summs]

The benoits and hal blood are great, but it's really a north east game, in places with low deer density. In maine, Remington 760's, peep sights and shooting deer on the run. Tough, close quarters, high stem count soft woods, with clear cut openings to stretch some shots.

A TLDR for the books : follow the deer's tracks...

Sure over simplified, but you have to know your game, if you cut a white tail track at 8am and it's fresh and headed towards a ridge top, odds are it's going to lay down. When the trail is going straight for a mile, the deer feeds and suddenly turns 90 degrees, it's probably watching you from it's bed or spooked already. Hardest part is determining the age of a track, and that just takes time. Track rabbits, deer, squirrels, what ever leaves a foot print. Knowing when the last snow fell, or if a track is frozen only on the edges. Things that can be said, but you have to feel and see to get better at. And to top it all off, you find a fresh track, now when to run and when to creep the last 100 yards...

I lived in Maine and fell in love with tracking, I learned more in 2 years without seeing a deer than I did in the last 10 hunting from tree stands.

 

[moxford]

@3325 has it right. All the man-tracking stuff is a great place to start especially if you can get into one of the formal tracking courses. (Local SAR may sometimes have an extra slot, or help with local resources. Local PD or sheriff as well, as they have POST-certified courses at times.)

And once your eyes are attuned, it is surprising what you can see; weather was super mild, but I tracked a guy who was in his socks on a remote mountainside ... that was a 6 week old track. It was a recovery, but the family was able to at least have closure.

The Tom Brown stuff does get a bit out there in style, but it can be entertaining reading and does have some pretty decent concepts even if some others are a bit ... foofy. The impressions, liftoffs, and aging go into a bit more fine detail than the man-tracking courses ususlly do.

Then it is all dirt-time to actually be able to see it, relatively quickly, in the field.the

Cheers,
-mox