Tracking
There’s no recording of this volume, so your phone reads it out, section by section.
Reading what the animal left behind, and the hour after the shot, when it matters most.
The print
A deer's hoof print is called a slot, and it is the most common sign you will find and the easiest to misread. Each slot is two toes, called cleaves, long and pointed at the front, rounded at the heel. The points face the way the deer was going.
A fallow slot runs about 6.5 cm long in soft ground, according to the British Deer Society, and the UK Deer Initiative puts the average adult at about 70 by 50 mm. Look at the back of it. A deer's cleaves leave a slight gap between them at the heel. In soft ground or at speed, two small marks often show behind the slot: the dew claws, close together, right behind the heels.
Deer prints are generally bigger than sheep, goat or pig prints, but young animals blur that line, so size alone settles nothing. Shape does.
1. The toe tips
Pointed, and pointing the way the deer went. On a hard track the tips may be all that prints, two little arrowheads.
2. The cleaves
Two toes, long and fairly narrow, with the outer edges curved. A heavy buck's are bigger, and often spread a little under his weight.
3. The gap at the heel
A slight gap between the cleaves at the back. It is one of the best checks you have: a sheep's toes sit almost tight together, with little or no gap.
4. The dew claws
Close together, right behind the heels, and only in soft ground or at speed. A pig's dew claws print too, but well apart and out to the sides.
The fallow buck's slot on the left stays put. Pick something to set beside it, at the same scale, and lay the slot over it to see the difference. Every square is a centimetre.
Fig. 2Prints drawn to one scale. The fallow follows the published measurements. The others are typical adult prints, and every species varies with age, sex and ground.
The same slot, left alone. Freshness is the question that matters, because a print from last week tells you about last week. In very fresh tracks the soil at the bottom is still damp, and the sun dries the base out first. After that it is weather and time doing their work.
Crisp, damp, sharp
Sharp edges, a damp base darker than the soil around it, and little crumbs of soil pushed up and out where the hoof pressed in. Minutes to an hour or so. Get your glass up: it may be watching you.
The base dries out
The edges are still crisp but the bottom of the print has dried to the colour of the ground around it. The pushed-up crumbs are still there. Today's track.
The edges soften
Wind and the sun round the edges off. Crumbs fall in from the walls, and leaves and grass blow into it. Still worth knowing about, because it tells you the deer use this route.
Rain pits inside it
Little craters from raindrops, inside the print as well as around it, mean the print was made before the last rain. If you know when it rained, you have a date. A print with no pits after a shower is newer than the shower.
Shallow and faded
The print has slumped into a soft, shallow dent, and an insect has walked a line straight across it. Anything that crosses a print came later. Old news.
Fig. 3One slot, five ages. Drag through them.
Lore
A deer walks on the tips of two toes, its third and fourth. The dew claws behind are its second and fifth, shrunk and hitched up the back of the leg so they only touch down in soft ground or at a run. The first toe, the one that would be our thumb, is gone altogether.
How it was moving
One print says a deer stood here. A line of them says how it felt about it. A deer walking at ease leaves an even, unhurried line of prints. A deer that was frightened leaves deep, splayed prints, far apart, with soil kicked back out of them.
Field guides add a caution: when you are sizing a deer from its tracks, use the prints of a walking animal, because a running deer's toes spread and every print looks bigger than the foot that made it.
Walking, a doe sets each hind foot down on top of or just outside the print her front foot left, so you see a line of slightly doubled prints. A buck's hind feet tend to land inside and well short of his front prints, which is one way a line of tracks can tell you the sex. Faster, the hind feet start to land ahead of the front prints and the stride stretches. At a full run the prints come in groups of four, splayed and deep, with the dew claws showing.
And then there is the fallow special. A spooked mob often leaves with a stiff-legged bouncing gait, all four feet landing at once, which leaves tight clusters of four with long, empty gaps between them.
Even, close, doubled
Short, regular steps, each hind foot landing on or just beside the front print, so each mark looks doubled. That is a doe's walk. Unhurried. This deer did not know you were there.
Longer, straighter
The stride stretches and the line narrows, and the hind feet start landing a little ahead of the front prints. Going somewhere with purpose.
Groups of four
At a run the feet land in sets of four, hind feet ahead of the front, with long gaps between sets. The toes splay and the dew claws print. Something frightened it, and at the strike after a shot this is often the first thing you find.
Four together
All four feet land at once, in a tight cluster, with a long gap to the next. A fallow's alarm bounce. Deep, splayed and spaced well apart.
Fig. 4The same deer at four speeds. The line changes before you ever see the animal.
Lore
That stiff-legged bounce has two names, and both are borrowed. Stotting is from a Scots and northern English word meaning to bounce, as in stotting a ball off a wall. Pronking is Afrikaans, from a verb meaning to show off or strut, and it is a cousin of the English word prance.
What else it leaves
Prints are only one kind of sign. A deer that lives on a block also leaves droppings, beds, paths, rubbed saplings, hair on the fences and, in the rut, bare scraped earth. Each tells you something, and the best of them tell you how long ago.
The old word for deer droppings is fewmets. Fallow drop small, oblong pellets about 15 to 20 mm long and 7 to 8 mm wide, often with a little nipple at one end, usually in a heap that breaks apart as it lands. Fresh ones are soft, often olive green and coated in a thin film of mucus. After a day or so the coating has gone and they turn brown, then dark brown to black.
- Pellets that point both ends
- Goat. Cylindrical and pointed at each end. Sheep pellets are dimpled or rounded at the ends and often irregular. Rabbit droppings are round and fibrous, like little balls of chewed grass.
- Roo and wallaby
- Also pellets, and they can be hard to tell from deer at a glance. Look at the prints beside them instead.
- Semi-liquid pats
- Clumped, soft dung, rather than pellets. A deer with scours, or a buck in the rut.
Frays and rubs. A buck rubs his antlers on saplings to strip the velvet, starting around February, and thrashes them in earnest through the rut. The bark comes off in ribbons, usually between about 60 cm and 1.2 m off the ground, sometimes as high as 1.6 m. To age one, scrape a fresh mark beside it with your knife and compare: fresh wood is pale and wet, old wood greys off.
Scrapes. In the rut a buck paws patches of soft or sandy ground bare on his stand, marks them with urine and scent from the glands below his eyes, and rolls in them. The ground around gets trampled flat. They are old news by October, but the stand is where they were.
Beds. Flattened ovals in grass or leaf litter, often in cover and often several together where a mob lay up. Look for hair in them. Deer hair is hollow, and a hair bent in two kinks like a drinking straw, which tells it from almost anything else's.
Paths. Deer use the same routes over and over, and the regulars wear into narrow pads through the grass and timber. Hair caught on fence wire marks where a path crosses.
Wallows. Pigs have no working sweat glands and wallow in mud to cool off. They root the hollow up before they get in, and on the way out they rub against a tree or rock beside it, which ends up plastered in dried mud and bristles. Fallow make wallows too, mostly bucks in the rut, in damp ground with rubbed, muddy trees nearby. Rounded prints say pig. Pointed slots say deer.
Lore
The oldest tracking advice in English is about droppings. The Boke of St Albans, printed in 1486, has a master huntsman teaching his man to judge a hart before ever seeing him: find where he lay and where he dropped his fewmets. Yellow and slimy, and the hart is fat. Black, hard and clean, and he is lean. And if you doubt it, says the master, look again in winter.
The first half hour
This is the most important chapter in this book. Most shots kill cleanly and the follow-up is just a walk to collect the animal. A few do not, and what you do in the next half hour decides whether a wounded deer is found and finished quickly or dies slowly somewhere nobody looks.
The rule that sits over all of it: assume every deer you shot at was hit, even if it showed no reaction and ran off looking fine, until a thorough search proves otherwise. Victoria's game authority and the UK's Deer Initiative both put it that way. You do not get to decide you missed from where you are standing.
The work starts before the shot. Fix in your head exactly where the deer is standing: which tree, which rock. When you fire, keep watching through the scope. First impressions are fleeting, but usually right. Listen for the strike. Work the bolt straight away and stay on the deer, ready for a second shot if it needs one.
How a deer reacts to the shot varies with where it was hit, its condition, the angle, the bullet and the range, so treat these as tendencies, not rules. They are drawn from the UK Deer Initiative's follow-up guide.
Kick, head-down gallop, down
The hind legs kick out and the deer goes off in a flat, head-down gallop, then collapses, often within 50 metres. At the strike: bright blood, pink spongy lung, hair from the flank, usually a strong trail.
The same, but further
The same kick and gallop, but it may go as far as 150 metres. Bright blood and lung at the strike, hair from higher on the back, and a trail that can weaken and fade. Be patient and thorough.
Front legs off the ground
The front legs, sometimes both ends, leave the ground, and it gallops off head down, maybe more than 100 metres. Lots of hair from low on the flank, bright blood and bits of rib or brisket. The trail can be hard to follow.
A dull thud, a hunch
A dull thud at the strike. The deer hunches or jumps, then stands humped or walks off slowly and stiffly, and usually lies down not far away with its head up. Small amounts of dark blood, gut contents, belly hair, spots of blood rather than a trail. Back off quietly. This one needs hours.
Staggers, leg swinging
It staggers at the front or goes down with its head up, then gets going with a leg hanging or swinging, and may run almost normally. Short leg hair, splinters of long bone, little bright blood, and a trail that thins out fast, especially once it lies down. Get a dog onto this if you possibly can.
Drops on the spot, then the head comes up
An instant collapse, but the head comes back up, or it struggles, rolls, or drags itself on its front legs. A clipped spine or the top of the neck can stun a deer that then gets up and goes. Shoot again straight away, safely. Do not walk up to it and admire it.
Alert, and fine
It stays put with its head up and alert, or runs a short way and stands looking about, maybe barking. Probably a miss, and you still go to the strike and search properly, and follow its line, before you believe it.
- At once
Watch where it goes
Note exactly where it was standing, where it was last seen, and which way it went. Listen. A crash, a kick or rolling stones tell you where it went down.
- Before you move
Mark where you shot from
Tie flagging tape where the rifle was, or drop a pin on your phone. From the strike you can then look back and see the line the bullet took.
- Then
Note the time, and wait
Rifle safe, eyes on the spot. If the deer gets up where you can see it, a quick, safe second shot.
- After the wait
Go to the strike
Quietly and directly to where the deer stood, looking for sign before you arrive, because it is easy to walk straight over it. Mark the strike too.
Because a wounded deer that is not pushed usually lies down, and often dies where it lies. Follow too soon and you jump it out of its bed and it runs, often a long way and into worse cover, and the blood trail thins with every bound. A clean chest shot kills quickly. The wait is for the shots that were not clean.
Guides, not laws
These are the rules of thumb taught by hunter-education sources, the NSW handbook and Victoria's game authority among them, and they vary a little from one to the next. In warm weather a long wait costs you meat. That is the price of the bad shot, and the deer's welfare comes first. The UK's best-practice guides go further and expect a trained dog to be available for following up a wounded deer.
Lore
In Germany the follow-up is written into federal hunting law. Section 22a of the Bundesjagdgesetz says a wounded animal must be killed without delay to spare it avoidable pain, and neighbouring hunting districts sign written agreements in advance about following one across the boundary. In German hunting language a wounded animal's blood has its own word, Schweiss, and there are hounds bred to follow it, the Hanoverian Schweisshund among them.
What the blood says
At the strike, and along the trail, the blood is a message about where the bullet went. Read it carefully before you start following, because it decides whether you follow now or back off and wait. Look at the colour, whether there are bubbles in it, whether there is anything else in it, and how much of it there is.
Fig. 6What the blood tells you, and how long to wait. Colours are typical: in poor light, check with a white tissue.
Keep to one side
Walk beside the trail, not on it, so you do not smear the sign or lay your scent over it for a dog.
Mark as you go
Tape a branch every few metres, five in the NSW handbook. The tapes show you the line the deer was taking, and where to start again if you lose it.
See the next sign before you move
It is too easy to guess where the deer went, take a shortcut and lose the trail altogether.
Look up, and look ahead
Blood is often smeared on grass and leaves up to shoulder height. Spend as much time looking ahead for the deer as down at the ground.
Read the splashes
Drops splash forward in the direction of travel. Prints, scuffed earth, turned damp leaves and snapped twigs fill the gaps between the drops.
Is that blood, or a red leaf?
Wipe it with a white tissue: blood shows red on the paper. A spray of hydrogen peroxide fizzes on blood. Dried blood goes brown and is easy to miss on brown grass, so slow down where the ground matches it.
Where do wounded deer go?
In steep country, hit animals usually head downhill. They make for thick cover to lie down, and often toward water. When a good trail suddenly stops, look hard into the nearest thick stuff.
How far before I call it a miss?
Victoria's game authority says follow at least 150 metres, and only call it a miss after a thorough search finds no blood, hair or other sign of a hit. One look at the strike is not a search.
What about following in the dark?
Hard. The UK Deer Initiative calls a blood trail by torchlight very difficult without a dog. If you shoot late, be ready to follow up at once with a dog, or tape the last sign, mark it on your phone and come back at first light.
Lore
The hair at the strike can tell you which way the bullet went. Hair at the entry is usually cut clean by the bullet. Hair blown out of the exit tends to come away whole, roots and all, sometimes still on a scrap of skin. A grazing shot leaves a lot of hair and little else.
Finding it
Sometimes the trail just stops. The blood dries up, the ground goes hard, or the deer turned where you did not expect it. This is the moment people start walking about at random, hoping to stumble on it, and it is exactly the wrong thing to do. Random searching tramples what sign there is, and pushes a living deer on.
Go back to your last tape and work outward in a pattern instead. Think like the deer first: where would it go to lie down?
Get help early. A second pair of eyes doubles the search, and in thick cover a few people can quietly cover the ways out, provided everyone knows where everyone else is and nobody fires without a clear, safe shot. And if there is a trained dog to be had, get it. A dog on a long lead, started at the strike, will follow a trail a person cannot see.
If the trail crosses a boundary fence, stop. You need the neighbour's permission before you go onto their land, and taking a firearm onto someone's land without it is a serious offence in NSW. Ring them.
Stop at the last blood
Tape it if you have not already. Do not walk on past it. Everything you need to find next is somewhere ahead, and your feet are the biggest threat to it.
Think like the deer
Look along the likely ways out: the game trail, downhill, toward water, into the nearest thick cover. Walk each a little way slowly, eyes up as much as down.
Widening circles
From the last mark, search in circles that get bigger each time, slowly, looking at every bit of ground and every bush.
Or grid it
Divide the ground ahead into squares and search them one by one, down on your hands and knees if that is what it takes. With a partner, walk parallel lines within sight of each other so no thick patch is missed.
Put a dog on it
A trained dog on a long lead, started at the strike rather than the last blood, follows scent where a person sees nothing. This is the deer that was lying in the thick scrub the whole time.
Fig. 7A lost trail, and the search that finds it. Drag through the steps.
When you see it down, stop and watch for a few minutes. Look for the chest rising and falling. Then go in from behind, on the spine side, away from the legs and antlers, rifle loaded and safe, with the scope turned down in case you need a quick, close shot. Know where a second shot would go and what is behind it.
A dead animal's eyes are usually open and glazed. Touch the eye with a long stick: if it blinks, it is alive. If it is alive, shoot it again from where you have a clear, safe shot. Only when you are sure it is dead, unload.
- Flagging tapeBright, and plenty of it. You take it all down again afterwards.
- A head torch and spare batteries
- Your phone, chargedDrop a pin at the firing point and at the strike.
- White toilet paper or tissuesTo check suspect blood.
- A knife
- A drag rope
- Water
- A mateTwo people find more than one, and one of them can fetch help.
The duty
You owe a wounded animal every reasonable effort to find it and kill it quickly. In NSW the Game Hunting Licence Code of Practice makes that a condition for licence holders. On private land you may not hold that licence, but the cruelty law still covers you, and its defence for hunting only applies where no unnecessary pain was caused. The Law in NSW has the detail.
And on this trip it does not need a statute. The hunt stops, everyone looks, and we do not give up on a deer until it is found or every reasonable way of finding it has been tried. Then the work starts: Field to Freezer.
Lore
A British study of 2,281 first shots taken at deer found that 6.7% of shots wounded an animal, but only 1.2% of deer got away wounded. The difference between those two numbers is deer that were wounded and then found and finished. That is what this chapter is for.
Try the field game, and see whether you can read the sign against the clock.