How to become a highly effective tracker

[justinspicher]

I did a man tracking course while I was in the military, back in 2005. It was pretty legit. The instructor was a Rhodesian SAS cat and I learned a ton from him.

Fortunately, I have only had to track a few animals in my hunting career, but I’ve always been able to find them.

My most recent tracking job was last month when a buddy shot a bear. We tracked it 1200yds from where he was initially shot to his final resting place.

Patience and perseverance are keys to tracking.

 

[Beagle1]

Tracking at night is a whole different game than during the day. Have a good headlamp and least two sets of batteries. Have a good backup headlamp/light and spare batteries. I like Zebra lights with a handful of spare 18650 batteries Do not depend on your phone light as a backup. If you don’t have light it’s game over.

Know the weather that’s coming in. If it’s rain the often good conventional advice to break for the night and come back early the next morning won’t work. You just have to go full bore until your lights run out or the rain completely washes out the blood. For flagging in those conditions toilet paper is a bad idea use surveyor’s tape.

If you find the deer and will be dragging it out with an ATV that’s a long ways away hang one of your lights above the deer. Then set an Onyx track back to the ATV so you can follow it back to your deer.

Keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. There will be highs and lows during a difficult track. Numerous times you’ll want to give up. Just ride those emotions out then get back to tracking.

A couple nights ago I found an 11 point I tracked for three hours during a light rain. As soon as I found him it started pouring like hell. I made some mistakes during the track I shouldn’t have but I had a good light, kept at it and had a bit of luck.

 

[CMF]

Preserve any and all evidence of where the animal was or has been. Walk next to the animal's trail, not over it. Stomping over the blood and tracks you are attempting to follow will hurt you big time if you need to work backwards and I'd always rather be backtracking over the animal's prints than my boot prints, though if you're just retracing your steps your boot prints can still show you where you've already been.

Great point, I think many overlook.

I’ve see a couple people referencing “trajectory”. I obviously understand it’s the direction the elk went off, but are you guys saying generally speaking a wounded elk is going to continue roughly in the same line unless the topography makes it change course or it expires?

I think if there is lack of additional evidence to follow(blood or tracks) You follow it's last known trajectory, either the way you saw it go, or if like most you run out a blood trail with some toilet paper you can look back at your toilet paper trail and see the "trajectory" he was going. I would start by following the trajectory then expand following any game trails I came across, and as a last resort, grid search.
I don't have enough data points tracking elk to say what they'll do. I've seen one run straight down hill and another side hill mainting the same elevation. I've seen whitetails do some crazy things.
My son got his Oryx tracking it after we cut tracks crossing a road. We tracked it for a mile before jumping it. At one point, that thing had made a complete circle, not big, maybe 150-00yds. It was interesting to follow.

 

[CMF]

Don't forget about track dogs. I think they are too often overlooked, especially out west. A dog can track better than any human.
Research the state or area you'll be hunting and find the fb groups or online list of dog trackers and save them in case you need them.

 

[Eleven]

Tracking isn’t just an activity for after the shot. Someone gets good at tracking by doing it all the time, not just in a recovery scenario.

The biggest tid bit I can share on tracker is to actually define what a track is…. A track is a disturbance to a baseline. Whether that disturbance is on the ground, on the bushes (broken branches), from a foot, from blood drops. It was mentioned in an above post that taking a tracker from one are to some place completely different can be difficult if they’ve never dealt with that baseline before. So, back when I was doing way more tracking, I would study different baselines and observer and play with various substrates to see how different things showed up. We used to call it collecting baselines.