11/23/2024
Pretty much every single track we take we hear “great lung blood”. It rarely is. Y’all heard “bubbles in the blood” when you were younger and have been saying it ever since. Bubbles form as the blood splatters, drips, gets pushed through the hide/hair, etc. Don’t put too much faith in whatever blood you find. Take a picture and relay that to your local tracker and they can tell you way more about what it looks like. Some tracks have a mix of liver, gut, lung, and muscle blood all at once. What we really want to pay attention to is how far that deer has traveled with that “great blood”. Is it walking or still running, has it bedded, is it limping, etc. If you’ve gone 500 yards on your “great lung blood”, go ahead and assume something is wrong and you need to back out and reconsider. Don’t keep going and pushing that deer out of the country.
Something we trackers hear ALL THE TIME is “we have tons of blood” and “lots of lung blood with bubbles”.
This picture is from a deer that was shot a couple weeks ago. The hunter tracked this deer 600-700 yards and there was blood like this almost the entire way. They lost blood and called in Boots.
We showed up and tracked the deer another 1,000 or so yards. Similar blood for most of it. My inclination when I got the first blood pic from the hunter was neck or brisket.
The “bubbles” you see in the blood is from the blood “frothing up”; not lung blood. We pulled off this track without a deer. Unfortunately it was a GIANT and the hunter was pretty torn up.
Well, about a week later he showed back up on camera seemingly fine. FTR, the amount and color shade/appearance of the blood rarely means much. Don’t get me wrong, more blood is better than less when it comes to tracking, but more blood really only means there’s more blood and nothing else.
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