subject: Dos Plumas Hunting Ranch - Bow Hunting Tips: Tracking Wounded Animals Too Soon [print this page] A big mistake I see bow hunters making comes after the shot: tracking wounded animals way too quick. You know, we read about it and hear about it, about having to wait at least 30 minutes before you check out the animal and look at all the signs, giving the animal time to expire.
Well, we're living in a society where, "I gotta have it now." Instant gratification. We gotta hurry up. We don't have time to wait. Cell phones, computers, everything that we deal with nowadays " it seems we don't have the time to wait on anything.
So subconsciously I think that plays into our hunting where a lot of guys don't know how to gear down whenever they walk into the woods and show more patience. So if they did make a good shot or a marginal shot, they need to wait 30 minutes or so before they go tracking their animal. It doesn't do any good to go in there five minutes later, bump that animal up, and he takes off and you never find it. Even on a good shot, adrenaline is a powerful drug. And when they get that adrenaline going, they can jump up and do some amazing things and go a tremendous distance.
So you just need to think about that and be patient. Come up with some way of getting yourself to settle down and be patient. Make a phone call. Talk about what just happened. Whatever you gotta do to get yourself to wait before you go and look for that animal.
Guys ask a question, "Well, do you want us to go down and look for the animal?" Or "How do you want us to track it?" I tell "em, "Well, if you want me to help you, don't go out there looking and try to follow the blood trail yourself because there's a lot of times you're going to bump that animal up. And if you do that and I don't know it, then we're going to spend a lot of wasted time out there in the woods looking for something that's already gone."
So I think it's very important that a bow hunter marks where he was, especially if you're spotting and stalking. But you need to mark where the shot was from, first and foremost. Go exactly to where the pig or the animal was standing. And then mark the last place you saw the animal. Those three spots are crucial when it comes time to actually going and looking for your animal. Try to track it down. I don't think it's too bad to mark where you were and then where the animal was and before you lose the site picture, go mark the other one.
Come back to where the animal was and then look for your arrow. An arrow will tell you a lot of things " if it was a good hit, a bad hit or marginal. I can't tell you how many guys will shoot and think that they missed when they shot them through the gut just because there's no blood. There's a lot of parts on the animal that you can shoot where you're not going to find much blood, especially if it goes through the gut area.
So you need to feel, use your senses, touch. Whenever a guy shoots one through the gut and he looks at the arrow, he says, "Ah, I missed."
"Well, how do you know?"
"Well, I ain't got no blood on my arrow."
"Oh, you found the arrow. Okay. Good."
And then we'll take that arrow out of the quiver and"our ground out here is so dusty"and there's dust everywhere. There's dust in almost every hunting situation unless you're hunting in a swamp or something or in the rain"or snow, I guess.
But if it's dry conditions, you can touch that arrow and feel grit on it when it's bounced off the ground and you go pick it up. If it's gritty from one end to the other, that means pretty much"it's been wet. And wet usually means it's gone through an animal. Then that dust sticks to it. And so you can touch your arrow very lightly and you can feel that grit on it. And it'll tell you that you've hit it.
Especially on hog hunting. They'll always hit a trail when they take off. And we can go down that trail. There may not be any blood right there. But we can go down that trail 20 or 30 yards and usually there's some type of blood that we can track and start using that to trail the animal.
