00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about blood trailing deer and what it can teach us, not only about how to find you know, mortally hit, wounded deer, but just dear behavior in general. When it comes down to it, there’s so much about deer that we just don’t understand. We fill in the blanks a lot to compensate for this, but it’s just simply true that for the most part, their world is.
00:00:51
Speaker 3: Kind of a mystery.
00:00:52
Speaker 2: This hits me upside the head like a bag of wet cement a couple of times each season, and it’s always a good reminder to check what I think I know over is what the deer actually tell me in the moment, which is kind of what this episode is all about. It’s the heartbeat in my ears that I love the most. If that sounds like I suffer from schizophrenia, well maybe I guess. But what I’m referring to there is what happens to me when I see a deer that I know I’m going to try to shoot. I love that feeling so much, and I bet you do too. The cool thing about my life right now is that not only do I get to experience that for myself a handful of times each season, I get to watch it vicariously play.
00:01:35
Speaker 3: Out with my daughters.
00:01:37
Speaker 2: The only time I felt it for sure this year was when I had just gotten winded by a doe in Minnesota and then got half winded by a little six pointer who was about one hundred and eighty degrees away from that dough. He just walked off when I turned around in my stand and saw an eight pointer walking along a trail near the pond I was hunting.
00:01:53
Speaker 3: Now, I have a few rules on.
00:01:55
Speaker 2: That particular property that I try to stick to, and one of them is that holding out for a giant is just not a good idea.
00:02:00
Speaker 3: That property is tiny, and.
00:02:01
Speaker 2: I share it, and in a lot of time hunting there, I have yet to see any deer that I would confidently say was over two and a half years old.
00:02:09
Speaker 3: The other rule I.
00:02:10
Speaker 2: Have there is to take really high odd shots, because even a liver hit deer could put a dying buck in some soccer mom’s backyard pretty quickly, and I would rather avoid that at all costs. While this buck checked all the boxes and I heard that familiar sound inside my head as I stopped him and drew. It was one of those no doubt smoked him type of hits, and I felt so confident he wouldn’t go far that I texted my daughters and told them it was time for them to track him for me. They showed up and we set out and found the arrow quickly. We then picked up blood and made it seventy five yards without too much trouble. The downside was that the deer wasn’t there, and I got that not so great feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don’t know a whole lot of people who hunt pressure deer who aren’t totally wrecked with self doubt, and you can count me into that camp.
00:02:57
Speaker 3: I can get there real quickly.
00:03:00
Speaker 2: The buck made it on a mode trail, peeled off slightly once, and then peeled off again twenty yards or so farther on.
00:03:06
Speaker 3: That’s where he was stone.
00:03:07
Speaker 2: Dead, and quite a bit farther than I expected, but not far enough to really matter much at all. The girls did a good job with the trail, even with me breathing down their necks, because taking third place in line on a blood trail is not my natural state. When that buck peeled off the trail the first time, I told them he was just looking for a place to die. I was right, kind of. He just didn’t follow through at that moment. Sometimes they are predictable, sometimes they aren’t. I think mostly they kind of aren’t. But we see what we want to see now. That wasn’t the last blood trail I was on, however. In the end of September, I took my daughters to northern Wisconsin to hunt sporks and does, and on the first day we had a dough flirt with death a lot. She made it through unscathed, but man, it was close. The following day we blanked in the morning, so we headed out for the afternoon sit with hopes in our hearts, me for a deer and them for a deer that would keep them from having to go to school. The next morning, Well, we finally heard something, and soon enough we had a spike buck standing really, really close to our blind. He didn’t like the vibe of the scene a whole lot. But the beauty of young bucks is that they aren’t very smart, and sometimes some of us just need a not very smart one to offer himself up to us. Well that’s what this one did. And he was so close to the blind that I was nervous. And I got really nervous when I looked down and saw that my daughter’s crossbow bolt was not going to clear the bottom of the blind or the bottom of the window, I should say, so, I whispered to her twice. I literally said, you’re not going to clear the window. Don’t shoot. I said that twice. And you know what she did. She didn’t shoot, Just kidding, she did, and that bolt smacked into the buck like a freight train. He went down on his chest and bulldozed his way out of our lives. But he didn’t go very far. Now, if you’re wondering how far that might throw off a bolt in the distance of maybe twenty five feet, I’ll say this a lot more than you’d want to.
00:05:02
Speaker 3: Risk it for.
00:05:03
Speaker 2: And we got very lucky because she caught a whole lot of vital stuff in that deer’s neck before it broke his off side shoulder. The blood trail looked like a scene from a horror movie, and he did that straightaway sprint of a deer in real trouble, no surprise there, which was nice. It was also nice to get lucky in the right way with a bad shot, because that doesn’t happen that often. Even though I don’t want to encourage her or anyone else to risk it for the old deer biscuit, if you know what I mean. Blood trailing is an interesting endeavor because it brings to mind the general behavior of deer that we all believe, or at least most of us anyway, things like wounded deer go to water, or wounded deer won’t go uphill, or a heart or double lung hit will result in a deer that’s dead within a certain amount of distance or a high entrance and no exit won’t bleed externally very much.
00:05:55
Speaker 3: You know all about it.
00:05:56
Speaker 2: But for most of us, if we go on more than a handful of blood trails in any game in season, that’s a lot most of us might get to do this a few times every fall, and that’s not enough time to get really good at anything, let alone learn a whole lot about dear behavior, especially wounded deer behavior. Oftentimes we were just left to fill in the blanks. That’s dangerous stuff because we just end up, you know, talking ourselves into believing something that we usually want to believe. The guy that I’m sharing that small property with here in the Cities hit a buck on opening weekend that bled like a stuck hog in a few spots and then stopped bleeding. At least according to the guy’s story, that’s what happened, and I don’t have much of a reason to doubt it now.
00:06:35
Speaker 3: My initial reaction was that it was.
00:06:36
Speaker 2: A brisket hit where those big chest muscles bleed like crazy for a while and then this bigot just turns off his blood trailing progress and eventual conclusion kind of sealed the deal for me. But you know what, I don’t actually know. I wasn’t on the trail. There’s no dead buck to bear witness to what actually happened. It’s all just a big maybe. Even if that big maybe exists with some high light likelihood of it being true, what’s worse, I assured him that the buck will probably survive. I’ve seen deer hit like that, and I’ve gotten them on trail camera later in the season. But I have also seen deer get hit like that and had zero evidence that they survived. My default is to assume that they did. But why well, I don’t like the thought of him, you know, dying a slow you know, ultimately probably not a very fun death, and then getting gobbled up by crows and coyotes. But that doesn’t mean that that didn’t happen. I’ve been on more than a few blood trails where bucks seemed to completely or mostly stop bleeding, and then a grid search has turned them up tucked into some dead fall or lane in four foot tall grass, in a meadow somewhere.
00:07:42
Speaker 3: You know. I killed a pretty good buck on public.
00:07:44
Speaker 2: Land in Iowa in twenty twenty that died in a river bottom and not in anything overly thick. But I still walked right by him dozens of times before coming back in the daylight and finding him within like two minutes. I had another deer I shot with a muzzle or die right next to me, and I had no idea until I got frustrated looking for blood, and walked back to right where I shot from, which was also like five yards from where he piled up. I shot a buck one time when I was in high school that was bleeding like a stock hog, and when I lost the trail, I nearly lost my mind. I knew he wasn’t gonna go uphill, because that’s all I had ever been told, and so it was a pretty big surprise that he did in fact go uphill, and I did, in fact not find him, but I did in fact see that deer some weeks later off the same stand. There are so many lessons tucked into those moments. Another time, I shot a buck that ran away from me in a very obvious direction, and after a lot of searching and not finding, I went on a whim the opposite way and found him two hundred yards down the ridge in the wrong direction. I still don’t know why he did what he did. But I did shoot a dough in the late season in northern Wisconsin quite a few years ago that walked a long ways on a trail before doubling back a long ways on the same trail. And I don’t know if she did it because I was blood trailing her, or if she did it because she just did. I know that both of those trails led me to question a lot of what I know about wounded deer, and I think about both of them every time I start a trail, and it just gets, you know, a little bit challenging. The rules we think they follow they often don’t. And something that might help us understand that occurred to me when I was sitting in that blind with my daughters waiting on a spike to show up. You know how when you’re bored or you’re hungry, you’ll just think about where you’re going to, you know, go or do, or find someplace to just sit down and eat. I wonder if that happens with deer like I wonder if they think, man, I can’t wait to get out of this bed and get over to some clover, although they wouldn’t call it clover because they probably don’t have names for their food anyway. I also wonder if they hear some acorns falling and think I better just go over there and check that out because that sounds tasty. Does that seem crazy? It probably is, But deer get the zuomies. Deer seem to get angry, they sometimes run to a food source, so I don’t know what thoughts they have or what emotions they feel. I wonder what they are thinking when they are hit, you know, by an arrow or a bullet, and if there is enough going on between their ears to constitute real panic or real contemplation. I’m not sure it’s for us to say. I’ve seen dogs do some pretty cunning things, and I’m not too sure the difference in intelligence between your average Labrador Retriever and your average wild white tail is all that different. I’ve also seen some do lots of things that seem to require no mental resources whatsoever, So who knows. What I do know is that the more blood trails I go on, the more I rely less on the rules for the deer and more on the rules for me and anyone else who is blood trailing with me. Some of these are pretty standard. I like really good lights, no surprise there. But I also like not much noise on my blood trails. Someone who tries to blood trail with their phone flashlight is not likely to get invited on too many blood trails with me, just like anyone who makes too much noise. I don’t know why, but I just generally prefer to be quiet in the woods as much as possible. This is one of the reasons it drives me nuts when people comment on hunting films by saying you don’t need to whisper after you shoot your deer. Sometimes you can’t help but let out a war cry or seven, But mostly I try to stay quiet because I’m always hunting where other people can hunt, so even if my hunt might be over, I’m not a huge fan of upsetting the balance in the woods any more than necessary, because I wouldn’t want people to do that to me if I still had a tag and was hunting out there anyway. On the blood trail front, I think being quiet just makes sense. I’m also pretty diligent about marking the blood really well. Sometimes that’s with on X, but usually I just keep my tracker on now so I can use it to guide me when the going gets tough, or tell me if I’ve already gone two hundred and fifty yards and it’s time to back out and wait for daylight. Flagging tape works well, but then you have to retrace your steps to pick it up. Paper does too, but that can be a little harder to see. Either way, if you’re paying attention, a good light, quiet tractors, and diligence on marking the spore are huge. Instead of totally guessing what the buck did, if you stick to those three things, you can make a pretty good decision on what he probably did.
00:12:17
Speaker 3: And those are great.
00:12:18
Speaker 2: But the theme that keeps popping up for me and hunting, and I mean all aspects of hunting, which does include blood trailing, is patience. I honestly think that if you want to kill more deer and definitely more big bucks, you need to learn the real value of patients. Most hunters are impatient and they want to make something happen. This is the Western hunting standard and their playing field sort of allows for it. But the world of white tail isn’t as conducive to impatience because a lot of us are on small parcels with an animal that is really good at not showing itself if it doesn’t want to be seen. This idea has led me to volume hunt spots with good sign A lot in recent years often need to give a location a few days before DearS show up, but they usually show up now. On the blood trail front, going slow with deliberation is huge. Anyone who is impatient on a blood trail isn’t welcome on my blood trails because it drives me absolutely nuts. The whole idea is to sort the puzzle out piece by piece, and a deer can go anywhere he damn well pleases. Finding that next speck of blood is what’s most important, that’s what matters the most. But this is where the Venn diagram of impatience and beliefs about wounded deer behavior become almost a complete circle. As soon as it gets tough, the impatient blood trailer will say, well, he probably went down to the creek since they need water, and then the wild goose chases on. The farther you start branching out from the last blood, the more ground you have to work with. Now, sometimes this is necessary, but it’s often not necessary. As soon as most blood trailers would like to believe. Patience here is a real virtue, and if you pair that with a well marked blood trail, you can really sort of tease out likely travel routes and start checking them off the list. You go through the obvious ones, and if the sign isn’t there, you go on to the ones that are less obvious. Now, if the sign still isn’t there, then you go for the ones that break the blood trailing rules, like checking the trail that goes straight uphill or backtracking and looking for a spot where he might have turned at some point. The impatient blood trailers don’t often work through the process that way. And the moment you start freelancing on a blood trail is the moment the clock starts ticking toward giving up. There is just such a shift in the vibe when that happens, and it rarely does us any favors. I don’t know how to say this any other way. It’s just really important. I think plenty of deer are loss to impatience on blood trails, and I think that’s a shame because it’s mostly avoidable. Now, I’m not saying you don’t have to color outside the lines on some trails, because you do. We all end up grid searching at some point, no matter how well we go through the initial trailing phase.
00:15:01
Speaker 3: It just happens.
00:15:02
Speaker 2: But it should be a well planned last resort, especially if you can’t get tracking dogs into the mix, which is a topic for another conversation. So anyway, think about this stuff when you’re killing time on stand and certainly when you take a shot or you get that text from your buddy that says grab your lights and head on over. Do that and come back next week because I’m going to talk about how to deal with change in the deer woods and why the good old days are just sort of a myth.
00:15:30
Speaker 3: That’s it for this week.
00:15:31
Speaker 2: I’m Tony Peterson and this has been the Wirre to Hunt Foundations podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening and for all of your support. You guys showed up big for white Tail Week last week. We really appreciate that. Here at meat Eater. If you still need to find some gear, you know where to find it. If you just want to check out some new films, maybe listen to some other podcasts, whatever, the medeater dot com has you covered, go check it out. Tons of content We drop new content literally every day they so you can get your fill and thank you again. M
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