SJAdventures

Most of it has already been mentioned and like someone already said I personally found out a long time ago one of the best tracking tool I had was giving the animal plenty of time to lay down after the shot. When I finally quit pushing wounded animals my recovery % went way up. It is OK when you know you smoked them to go after them as soon as a 1/2 hr but if there is any doubt in the location of the shot 4 hrs is as soon as I will go after them and if I know it was a bad shot I give them more time. One little trick I do for tracking a minimum blood trail is take some type of tissue and drop a piece at each location blood is found. Many times when I cannot find any more blood I can look back at the blood trail and see that I have gotten off the actual line that the blood trail is taking and can adjust back over in line with the existing blood trail and many times find more blood immediately. I have to go back and retrieve all of the tissue after the tracking is done but it is worth it. If you cannot find anymore blood then your woodsmanship has to take over. Be aware of everything. We once found a buck of mine that I hit poorly because the buck had ran into a chest high weed field that had multiple deer paths cutting through it (everyone knows these can be hard tracking without a lot of blood). Every deer path going through the field had spiderwebs with dew on them across the paths so they were shining in the morning sun. One of my buddies noticed that one of the paths had a freshly broken spider web on it so we took that one and found my buck. Be alert to your surroundings when tracking. If you bump the deer your tracking pull out immediately and give it "at least" 6 hours to lay back down