Often but not always you'll get one or two really well defined hoofprints in the dirt of a scrape. The grooves are telltale, but tracks are a definite giveaway. The licking branch, or broken branches can be duplicated at a mock scrape. In our area scrapes happen a lot under a hemlock branch that hangs over the deer path. It's usually broke up a bit and pieces of the hemlock are in the scrape.