Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, and now your host Tony Peterson. Hey, everyone, welcome to the wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about blood trailing, or more specifically, what you should do when you're actively on the trail. If you didn't listen to the last week's episode, I urge you to do
that before you listen to this one. That episode is all about understanding how to kind of interpret your initial instincts after you've taken a shot, and how to get started on developing a good blood trailing plan. This week is you know, it's a continuation of that, which is really going to involve everything you might want to think about when you've waited long enough off and it's time
to actually take up the trail. I honestly think this is one of the more valuable Foundations podcast I've ever written, so I hope I'm not way off base on that one, So listen up, learn, and hopefully you'll find more. Dear, my friends, about five years ago, I was standing at the bus stop with my little girls. The neighbor girl and her dad were there as well. It was the time of spring when the songbirds really start to make their way north, and I heard a familiar bird call.
I told the girls to listen up because there was a cardinal nearby. My neighbor said nope. So I said, what the hell are you talking about, Keith, And he said, that's not a cardinal. I told him that, I swear I've looked at cardinals, you know, dead in their eyes while they made that exact sound, and he said, nope, that's a chickadee. I can't tell you how right I
knew I was. So I went to YouTube, and amongst the German death metal videos and the basic how to fix it around your house kind of stuff that popped up, I started watching live birds actually calling, the way that live birds actually call. And do you know what, Keith was right. Somehow, my whole life, I had falsely attributed a bird call to the cardinal when it belonged to
a totally different species. The worst part was that I would have been a stupid amount of money that I was right and he was wrong, and if I had I'd have lost a stupid amount of money on a stupid bet made by well, a stupid guy who doesn't know shit about songbird calls. It's the things in life we think we know that we don't that are the most dangerous. Ask anyone who works at a bow shop or worse, I don't like the gun counter at Cabella's. What it's like to deal with confidently wrong people all
the time, and you'll hear a pile of horror stories. Now, I'm sure we all have these issues in one way or another, but you know where they are most damaging. While we're blood trailing, when you decide that wounded bucks always go downhill, or that the blood on the leaves definitely has to be lung blood, even though you're three quarters of a mile into the trail and it's anything but pink and frothy, then you're in trouble. This, if
nothing else, is a warning. Last episode, I told you to trust your initial instincts on the shot, and I meant that, but I also said trust the actual evidence more. In that case, it was the evidence on the arrow. In this case, it's the blood tracks and whatever else you can use to inform your trailing efforts. Trust the evidence.
Trust the evidence, Trust the evidence. I mean it. This is the best way to curtail too much optimism and to set a pace for the trail that might allow you to pick up on as many clues as post a bole. Now, I guess before you can trust the evidence too much, you have to understand what that means.
We've all heard, or we all know that pink and frothy blood means lungs, but it could mean one lung, or it could mean to and the difference is often a seventy five yard easy blood trail versus a much longer, much rougher, much less guaranteed to end in man hugs blood trail. The evidence in this case could be lung blood on one side of the trail, or on both. It could be long blood for two yards and then just less blood or only sparse red non long blood.
That means that you didn't get both lungs, and the short easy one is not in your future. But what about I don't know, dark red blood. That might be liver, but the liver is big, and no two liver hits seem to go the same way. If you look at the liver when you shoot a deer and I think you should. You'll see that it's a funky shaped organ
with all kinds of lobes on it. How you hit it and where you hit it can mean the difference between a three hour weight and a two yards successful track job, or an eight hour weight that turns into a nail biter after you jump him from his bed twice. Now, dark red blood is sort of like, I don't know, like a gray area. Heart blood is often rich and dark, and I bet that there are more than a few hunters who can't really tell the difference between the two.
After all, it's kind of the same blood all over in the deer's body. If you hit a vein or a muscle that isn't the heart, the blood is gonna look an awful lot like it came from the heart. But you'll know pretty quickly if that's the case or not.
The worst scenario here, and this happens a lot, is the more muscle you hit, and the heart is a muscle, remember that, especially low muscle, the more you'll get heart looking blood for a while, But then you won't, and you'll find yourself confused and sad and probably a lonely given that quick and probably not all too adequate description of some of the different types of blood you'll see in enough seasons of hunting. I really want to reiterate something.
If you believe you hit liver and the blood supports it, make a retrieval plan around that information. If you get into the blood trail on the evidence, stop supporting that, it's time to change your plan. For example, if that's the case and you give him six hours, but then you go out and you jump into fifty yards into the trail, you went too early. You know that now,
So what do you do? Give him more time. Time on a blood trail is your friend, even if you're fighting the urge to push on through because of the weather or some other factor. Now I should say this here because I've heard this story a lot. If you go hunting and you don't have enough time to blood trailer, poorly hit dear for whatever reason, be real careful on
your shot selection. I don't know how many times I've heard someone say that they hunted, you know, a quick one right before work, and then they hit one, but they didn't get to go out until their kids basketball practice was over that night or some other reason by then. Who knows, But In that case, time actually might not be your friend if it's too much time, and no matter what the evidence suggests, once you start on the trail, go slow, designate somebody as the leader, and if you're
with someone else, have them just back you up. They can be the trail marker, which is pretty easy to do with just some toilet paper or flagging tape. Being able to look at your markers tends to make the path forward clear because you can see the direction your dear is heading. Also, if you need to turn on your tracking on your on X, this helps a lot to show you the direction the dear is going and helps to read the terrain to see where it might
end up. Now I should say this too, if you do use flagging tape during your blood trailing efforts, please please go back and pick it up. I don't know why this is, but it sucks going into the woods seeing evidence of other hunters, even if you know other hunters have been in there a lot. Just seeing some flagging tape or a discarded water bottle or sent wick or whatever takes away from the experience a little bit. And I can't really explain why. I know, I just
don't like it. And I know other hunters probably don't too, or don't as well. Now, as you move along the trail slowly, try to really understand how much blood your dear is likely to lose. We often see a decent amount of blood right away, and we overestimate how much it really is. Now. Good rule of thumb here is, for every pound of live weight the deer has, So let's say it's a hundred and sixty pound deer, it's
gonna have one ounce of blood in it. So a hundred and sixty ounces one point two gallons, that's a lot of blood in that dear. And seeing blood on the ground doesn't necessarily mean that a lot of blood came out of that dear. And if you don't believe that, hang around with my kids for a little while while they spill ship all over my kitchen. And I promise you even a little cup of milk looks like a lot of milk when it's all over your floor and splattered all over the place. All right, that was a
little side ran. Anyway, when you go on a no doubt double lunger heart shot blood trail, you realize how much a lot of blood really is. This only gets more obvious in snow and other conditions that just highlight blood. But overall, you've got to be careful not to overestimate how much blood loss is actually happening. But you gotta also try to understand it's very likely that the blood loss hasn't stopped. Even if you do lose the blood trailer,
you can't find the next drop. Now, I know, blood law can and does stop in certain situations, blood clots up, things get in the way. You know, a little bit of intestine or fat in the exit wound can change things in a hurry, But mostly it probably hasn't stopped on the blood trail you're on. This is crossroads time on blood trails, and if you haven't been there yet, keep shooting. It will happen. The blood seems to dry up at some point, and that's when people start to
go a little rogue. You do have to try to find the next blood, but most people seem to think that's an immediate sign they should start looking for a whole deer carcass. This also gets them into the mode of walking pretty fast and looking, and while there is time for grid searching, it's not usually when you haven't found a new drop of blood in the last few minutes. In this situation, remind yourself that the blood likely did not dry up, but instead you're just sing it. That's
the most likely scenario. Instead of walking ahead twenty five yards and shining your flashlight around, spend time at last blood. Get on your hands and knees, Look not only at the ground, but at the vegetation around you. Think about what you might be getting wrong, Like maybe your bucks seemed to be headed straight for the river, which would make sense, but now there seems to be no more blood in that direction. Did he decide not to follow the rules and go somewhere else to lay up? Was
he never really headed there to begin with. I've seen wounded deer do everything they weren't supposed to do, go uphill, downhill, cross water, cut straight back on their trail, which is the worst. They do all kinds of stuff. They have a brain, they have four legs, and they are in a serious survival situation after we shoot them. In this case, if last blood has you really stumped, start circling nearby, not twenty five yards out, but maybe like three yards out.
Try to pick up the direction your dear went, because it went somewhere. If it backtracked, it will eventually peel off the original trail, which is when your sign marketing job really comes into play. Now, if you didn't mark the original blood well, you might find yourself really confused here.
It's also important to note that, depending on the entrance exit and the type of hit, uphill travel or downhill travel might greatly slow the flow of blood or increase it level travel might as well pay attention to what the blood looks like on every part of the trail, so you know whether it seems to increase or decrease due to some direction, and what the overall frequency seems to be at those times. Now, this might seem like overkill, but it's so much better to always be on blood
than to ever not be on blood. If you do truly lose the blood and you feel like you've exhausted your options near last blood, then then it's time to think are the conditions right for a grid search? Yet? Is the deer going to be fine if you back out and wait till morning to pick it up again in daylight? How far has the deer actually gone? What kind of headspace are you in a few years ago, I shot a good buck on public lane in Iowa. I hit him through the shoulder, which was not ideal,
but it also looked like it shouldn't matter. The penetration was pretty good, and he looked like a dead deer running away. When I started blood trailing him. The whole thing looked like a really done deal until he got to a part of a trail that went up a slight bank along the river. There I lost the blood, and with my head lamps, I looked and I looked, and I looked, and I got frustrated. I got angry with myself for not making a better shot. I finally
just left. I knew i'd have better luck in the morning, and I felt like that was a dead deer out there somewhere, but that I was also around a bunch of coyotes and was just full of anxiety that comes in such situations. In the morning, I had to wait for another hunter to wrap up before I could go in, because I didn't want to mess up his hunt. And when I did, I walked into the last blood and I looked over and saw my buck dead as disco, as Randy Newberg likes to say, laying not ten yards away.
I honestly must have walked by that buck twenty times in the night, but I wasn't really looking, if you know what I mean. The whole thing got a thousand times easier in daylight for obvious reasons. Even though he was kind of hold up in some really tall grass, I still should have found him. If you can't wait, or you feel like a nighttime grid searches right, then keep it tight. People often get way too far apart
and the thing is wounded. Prey animals often hide as best they can when they are as vulnerable as they are. After we shoot them, they'll tuck into dead falls occur up in the tall grass like that Iowa buck did. They are surprisingly easy to overlook. Hell, I shot a dough one time in Minnesota on some public land here in the Cities while I was muzzle loader hunting. That
just absolutely disappeared on me. I felt like I tend ringed her and I didn't see her take off with the rest of the deer, but I couldn't find her in a field of knee high grass. It was odd until I realized, in the melee of the shot and with all those animals scattering, that she had run damn here next to me and tipped over. I mean she was like right next to me, and I was missing her looking too far out and overdriving my headlights, so
to speak. All right, back to grid searching. Keep it tight, keep it planned, turn on your tracks on on X, mark your spots, go slow. Don't just focus on looking for a whole dead deer, but also keep an eye out for more blood or for running tracks. Do this especially when your grid search takes you across some kind of obvious deer trail. There's something out there that could clue you into keeping the whole trail going. You want
to find it. If you grid search at night with no luck, get back in there at first light and carry your binoculars. I carry them during all daylight blood trailing, so I can scan the trail ahead for blood and can scan the woods ahead for a dead deer or a bedded wounded deer. Dealing with the wounded deer is another story, likely fodder for a follow up podcast at some point, so I'm not going to get into it here.
Suffice it to say, the farther away he is when you spot him, the more options you have for a follow up. If it's at all possible. It's also worth saying a few other things that I absolutely believe good lights are your friend. I keep a whole blood trailing tote in my truck all season long, and you better believe I carry good lights and extra batteries. Giving up on a blood trail because I don't have enough juice to power my lights is not an option, and it
shouldn't be for you either. I like a bright headlamp at all times, but also a really bright handheld flashlight. I usually keep a small backpack in my blood trailing toad, and while I rarely remember to stock it with gutting gloves, that's a good idea too. It's also, as I've mentioned, a really good idea to have backup batteries or whatever size your flashlights use. There are some quality lights out there that are rechargeable, too, but I don't like them
for blood trailing. On the brightest setting, they tend to burn out pretty quickly, and that's not ideal. They are great for around camp and getting into an out of stands, but for real nighttime blood trailing work, I like something that operates off of batteries that can be replaced in twenty seconds. During the track job. And it should also be said, if you have the option to bring in
a dog, do so. It's not legal in every state and the rules very quite a bit, but generally speaking, a well trained tracking dog is going to make the best human tracker look like a joke. The key there, though, is well trained, and it depends on how much you've messed with the trail already. It's also dependent on being able to call someone who will be available if it's
an option in your neck of the woods. Keep a tracker's number handy, and keep yourself ready to back out quickly if you feel like the trailer is going to be a tough one. As long as the deer is dead and the dog is decent at the job, it's almost almost a guarantee they'll figure it out. Now, the time that has passed, the rain that has fallen, and probably some other factors I'm not thinking of, can complicate the whole thing and take it from a no doubt
find to a finger crossing ordeal. That's reality, but it's not an excuse to not try everything possible to find your deer. Lastly, I'll say this knowledge is great, but experience is king. If you have the chance to blood trail, do it and pay attention. Learn from each blood trail, the easy ones, the difficult ones. Get experience. The more you do, the more confident you'll be when things suddenly start to break bad and it's midnight and you're in
the middle of the wood. It's with a frustrated buddy who two hours ago thought he'd be calling a taxidermist and is now thinking that maybe he was meant to play pickleball instead of hunt. Good luck out there on those blood trails this season. I hope they work out for you. I really do, and I hope you tune in next week because I'm going to talk about what the options are for getting your dear out of the woods once you do find him. That's it for this week,
my friends. I'm Tony Peterson has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which has brought to you by First Light. As I always thank you so much for your support and if you want to get a little bit more of a white tail fix, feel free to check out Mark's new show on the Meat eat Or YouTube channel, which is called Deer Country. You can also visit the Wire to Hunt YouTube channel for how to videos. And go to the meat eator dot com slash wired to read all kinds of white tail related articles.