If you go back tomorrow to search for it, watch the skies for vultures, and listen to the calls of crows, and other scavenger birds. They will guide you to where the deer is located. If you didn't push that deer much , or too fast, he might just have found a place to lie down to rest. Look for thick brush that blocks the wind, or someplace near water. Animals need to cool their bodies from the adrenalin rush that comes on after they are wounded. They will lie down some place cool, and drink water if its near. They may even try to stuff moss, or leaves into a wound if they can reach it.
Stop looking for blood drops, and look for deer tracks. Go to some place where you know you saw blood, and take the time to look at the deer's tracks. Measure them with a pocket ruler. Take notes on all 4 feet, and look for anomalies- such a chip out of one of the 8 toes that make up its 4 hooves.
A heeled-over(Or fresh!) chip will help you identify that deer's tracks from all other similarly sized deer of that sex.
Whitetails are born in the spring, so that yearlings ( spike bucks) have hooves that are between 1/2 and 3/4" long That first Fall when we can hunt them. A 1 1/2 year old buck will have hooves that range from 1-1 3/4" long. A 2 1/2 year old buck will have hooves that range from 2-2 3/4" inches long. A 3 1/2 year old buck( getting rare to find these days) will have hooves that run from 3 to 3 3/4" long. A 4 1/2 year old buck will have hooves that run from 4 to 4 3/4" long, and will look like the tracks of a small cow, being more rounded, than heart-shaped as the tracks of younger deer appear. .
After that, the hooves don't seem to grow much in length, but as the buck ages further, their hooves tend to Splay more widely, and an almost permanent opening between the two toes appears in the tracks.
Its difficult( but not impossible) to age deer older than 4 1/2 years, examining their teeth.
If you hunt in corn country, the teeth on mature deer tend to wear down to the gum lines, and the bucks die from starvation and disease before they get much older. The same happens in areas where the deer are forced to eat tree bark through much of the winter to survive.
But, as far as its tracks, that splayed image indicates you are tracking an old HUGE deer. We have had deer killed here in the corn belt region of central Illinois that dressed out slightly more than 300 lbs. That means its live weight was close to 400 lbs. That is a HUGE WHITETAIL DEER!
[ NOTE: THERE ARE SEVERAL SUBSPECIES OF WHITETAIL DEER, and many of those living in the East and South of this country are much smaller than the deer we see in the upper Midwest.]
You can determine the sex of the animal that left its tracks by measuring the straddle- the distance between the right and left tracks, both from legs and then back legs.
Does have wider rear hips, because of the birth canal, and their feet tend to pitch outward more than do buck's hind feet, and the distance between a doe's rear feet is greater than the distance between her front feet.
A buck is the opposite. He has "skinny hips", and wide shoulders up front. The width between his front feet is wider than the distance between his rear feet.
Deer are " indirect Registering Walkers", meaning, that when a deer is walking, his rear feet tend to step almost directly onto and in the tracks left by his front hooves. Because his rear feet are closer together than his front feet, the rear foot steps to the inside of the tracks left by the front foot, leaving what appears to be a "doubling" of the track on the outside toe.
And, deer display eye dominance( 2/3 are Right Eye Dominant, and 1/3 are Left Eye Dominant) in their tracks, by the fact that their dominant front foot will take a slightly longer step than his non-dominant foot does. The tracks will show that doubling to the inside of the track, but on the dominant foot impression, some of the front of the toe of the front foot will also be visible in front of the full impression of the rear foot.
When you can use location, age, sex, and eye dominance to differentiate your wounded deer from all others in the woods, its a lot easier to find its tracks, and stay on its trail until you find it. Consider any blood you find to be the " Icing on your cake". The cake itself are the animal's tracks.
With the cool to cold weather we are having the meat should not spoil overnight.
Best of luck to you. :v :v
I once missed a deer, which one of my hunting partners then shot. I tracked that deer late in the afternoon as a storm "Blew" in with lots of wind, and rain. We lost the trail when winds blew all the leaves several hundred feet to the North, covering up tracks, and sailing away any blood we might have been able to see with our flashlights, and lanterns. We were sick of the fact that we had lost him, and his tracks.
I found what remained of him a month later, during the second half of the hunting season, with coyotes eating on the hide left on his neck, and very little else left of the head and jaw except the rack.
When the dogs left, I checked the animal to see where he was wounded- a 20 ga. size hole through its jawbone, that made it impossible for the deer to eat or drink. Then I went down the hill to my car, left my rifle, and walked back up in fresh rains, to chop off the rack. I gave half of it to one of the other hunters, who had a couple of projects he was working on. I kept the other rack to use for knife handles, and buttons for my pants.
You do what you can to recovered game you wound, and then accept the fact that sometimes, the elements work against you on this, no matter how much effort, or how much skill you have as a tracker. Wind, precipitation, and vehicles are the great track destroyers, and every tracker understands this. BTDT.
Better luck the next time. It must have been very exciting for you to see that buck walk into your shooting lane with your gun already prepared to fire. :v :thumbsup: :hatsoff: :hatsoff:
