Blood Trailing...Have You Ever Had A Trail Run Dry?

[ScottR]

Dan put this video together where he showed how he recovered a bear that he had shot with his bow but as bears tend to do the blood trail dried up. Here is how Dan was able to track it and find it for a recovery. How many of you have struggled when a blood trail started to thin or ran dry? How did you manage to recover the animal?

Hunting Tip: Using onX Hunt Markers & Tracking - Eastmans' Official Blog | Mule Deer, Antelope, Elk Hunting and Bowhunting Magazine | Eastmans' Hunting Journals

https://youtu.be/Js6kFrmOQuM Bow hunter Dan Pickar shares one of his favorite hunting tools. The onX

blog.eastmans.com

 

[mallardsx2]

Many times I have continued to look for animals after other had given up and ended up finding the animal.

I was watching over the should of a guy as he arrowed a bull in Colorado one year and we trailed it for 600 yards and the blood dried up. What he didnt know was I was reaching down and hitting the mark button on my gps the entire time so I had a good idea of what direction the animal was headed. (It works well for me. Its big country in the mountains and having a general idea on where something is going is pretty important. )

Long story short the guy said he must have just clipped it. I told him there was no way an animal could survive with an arrow in center body like that. I watched the arrow hit the elk. He started doing these wild ass crazy loops up and down the mountain in a panic. I just kept going down the same trail finding a speck of blood every 100 yards. He was adamant that it wasn't the blood from his bull and kept lapping the mountain which really didnt bother me because he was getting on my nerves anyhow...... 1/2 mile and 6 hours later I found his bull.

To this day he thinks I randomly stumbled upon it.

We dont hunt together anymore. For obvious reasons.

FYI: He had hit it dead center in the body with a 2 blade broadhead the arrow hit a rib going in, bent the two blade 45 degrees and the arrow turned into the gut cavity going through part of the liver and came out clear back by the the elks tallywhacker...

 

[taskswap]

Nice video, thanks for sharing. 100% on the value of GPS in the field. Hunt smart.

 

[Winchester]

Cool video. Thx Scott!

 

[Hilltop]

It has happened to me several times through the years. Before GPS, we used orange marking tape on tree limbs and maps to keep tabs on general direction. Now, like others have mentioned we use GPS. One of the notable ones from the past was a small buck I shot as a teenager. I hit the deer perfectly through both lungs and got a complete pass through. The buck ran as fast as I have ever seen a deer run. The blood trail was amazing for the first 60 yards- blood was on trees 5-10 yards on either side of the trail. Then the trail got smaller and smaller but he kept going. After 120 yards (measured after the fact), the blood was just gone- nothing. The ground was fairly soft so I was able to continue following the trail fairly easily until I found the deer, 225 yards from where he was hit. That deer had basically no blood left inside him when I cleaned him. If I hadn't seen where the arrow hit, I would have been really questioning whether I would even find it. That deer taught me a lot.