Bow Hunting 101 | Deer Blood Trail Tracking

If you’ve shot a deer before while bow hunting, you’re probably familiar with the general sequence of events. Going from shot to recovery can take mere minutes or days, depending on several factors. It’s always a possibility that we could lose sight of a deer blood trail, which is guaranteed to result in sleepless nights. Here are some tips for blood trailing deer so you can improve your recovery rates and become a better hunter!

Stages of Tracking a Deer

Hopefully, for your sake, you are reading this blog before you make the shot. Ensuring that you know and follow each step of the blood trail tracking process is extremely important. With that said, this blog will take you through each step of the deer blood trail tracking method from directly after the shot, to the point where you recover your deer.

Replay the Shot

The moments directly after you release an arrow are some of the most critical seconds of a hunt that can influence the end result. Assess the shot and replay it in your mind several times. After that, you should be able to answer each of these questions:

Which way was the deer facing?
Was there any quartering that could have affected what organs were hit?
How did the deer react when the arrow made contact?
Is there a noticeable landmark (dead snag tree, spruce tree, etc.) in the area you shot it?
Which direction did the deer run?
What is the last landmark you remember the deer running by?
Did you hear a crash?

Burn these details into your mind before you even think about packing up to start blood trailing deer. A good rule of thumb is to wait at least 15 minutes while you replay everything unless you watched the deer drop within view.

Many times, you can learn the most useful information by watching how the deer reacted and where your lighted nock disappeared. One of the benefits of using lighted nocks is that you can pinpoint exactly where the arrow strikes a deer. Regardless of which color nock you prefer, you can literally watch the LED light trail from the Nock Out Contender nocks and see precisely where it blinks out as it enters a deer’s chest cavity. Pay attention to how the deer behaves at this stage. If it jumps into the air and kicks its hind legs (oftentimes almost losing its footing), it’s very likely a heart, lung, or liver shot. If it hunches up its back and runs for a short distance before slowing down and walking away, you may have shot them in the paunch area in another place considered “no man’s land”.

Stage 2: Look for Evidence

After replaying all of these details in your mind, climb down and navigate to the landmark where you believe you shot the deer. This is where many hunters go wrong with tracking deer. Many hunters mistakenly just take up the trail immediately. Even if there is obvious blood, this action can ruin your recovery efforts quickly in the wrong situation. You’ll obviously be looking for blood, but also pay attention to hair, disturbed leaves, and broken branches. Lots of white hair means either your shot was low on the stomach or it exited the deer low.

Looking at the arrow

Hunting arrows can tell you a lot too. Examine the blood on it and give it a sniff. You may even have an indicator section or white wrap that can clearly show the blood. We’ll look at the blood types below for different shots, but if it smells rotten, it’s likely you made a paunch hit.

Stage 3: Deciding on the Type of Deer Blood

Knowing when to track deer after shooting is very important. Now for the real investigative part of the deer recovery process: the blood. Deer blood sign will be different depending on where you hit them. Look for this kind of blood evidence in the immediate vicinity of the shot location before proceeding with blood trailing deer.

Heart/Lungs

Blood from a heart and/or lung shot will be very distinctive. It will usually be bright red and frothy (lots of small bubbles) because blood in these organs is full of oxygen. Depending on the entry and exit wounds, you may also notice spurts of blood on the ground and even on the tree trunks and shrubs periodically, as the heart pumps it out.

Liver

Whitetail livers are tucked behind the lungs and higher up from the heart. Blood from these shots will usually be darker red or purplish, and may be thicker in consistency. It also may only drip from the deer after a while, producing a harder blood trail to follow.

Paunch (Stomach/Intestines)

The dreaded paunch or gut shot is something no hunter wants to make, but it does occasionally happen for a number of reasons. Blood from these hits will usually be thin and watery-looking, and may even contain green/yellow bits of undigested food in it. The blood will also smell foul, like stomach contents ought to.

Stage 4: Blood Trailing Deer

Knowing how to track a wounded deer is a critical skill you need to have. Depending on what you find at the arrow site, you’ll have a few different choices to make. Obviously, the sooner you recover your deer, the fresher and safer the venison meat will be. You may also be contending with coyotes and other hungry scavengers who would happily steal your kill. So knowing how long to wait and ultimately how far a deer will travel will help you know when you can start tracking a deer.

Tracking Heart/Lung Hit Deer

Unsurprisingly, the heart and lungs are vital organs, so a deer shot in either of them won’t last long or travel far. If you find frothy bright red blood at the shot site (and assuming you waited at least 15 minutes before getting down), you should be able to take up the trail immediately. It’s unlikely for a heart/lung-shot deer to travel more than 100 yards unless you only clipped one lung.

Tracking Liver Hit Deer

While a liver shot is always fatal, it will take longer for a deer to expire. If you find the thicker, dark red blood, wait at least four hours if possible before you start tracking. Liver shot deer will usually bed down within 200 yards to rest. If unpressured, they will usually bleed out and expire in these first beds. But if you rush in, you may jump the bedded deer. Since they may only produce droplets for a blood trail, every further inch you push them makes your tracking job much harder.

Tracking Paunch or Stomach Hit Deer

A paunch shot is usually also a death sentence for a deer, but it could take days to happen. The blood trail may also be sparse enough for you to lose the trail before you find the deer itself. If you notice a foul smell on your arrow or thin watery blood, quietly back out of the area. If there is no rain forecasted and if it’s a cool night, you can leave a deer overnight to track it in the morning. If it’s going to be hot in the early season, rainy, or you’ve got lots of predators on the property, try to give it at least four hours before blood trailing. Similar to the liver discussion, you don’t want to jump them from their beds. A gut-shot deer can run for miles before expiring, which could potentially push them off your property.

Stage 5. Employing Helpful Blood Trailing Tips and Tactics

Slow Down! – When blood trailing deer, you need to move slowly and pay attention to everything simultaneously. You’ll need to move three to five times slower than normal so you can scan the ground and trees for blood and glance ahead to look for the deer. Stop often to listen and scan ahead with binoculars.

Walk to the Side – As you walk along, make sure you don’t destroy the blood trail by walking on it – walk to the side of the trail. When you lose track of the blood, leave signs at the last spot you saw it. You can use flagging tape, toilet paper, or even your Nock Out lighted nocks! Start by walking in small circles around the last spot, and you’ll usually find where the blood trail picks up again. If you can’t find more blood, as mentioned above, pay attention to upturned leaves, rushed deer tracks, and broken branches, as this indicates a deer moving through the area at a fast pace.

Keep One Nocked – Keep your bow nocked with another arrow in the off-chance you can make a follow-up shot, if needed. This is harder for archery than it would be with a firearm, but sometimes you might spot a bedded deer and get a shot before it bolts again.

Hopefully, you’ll have an opportunity this fall to put these blood tracking tips to good use. If you haven’t already check out the NEW Contender Lighted Nocks from Nock Out®.

Contender Lighted Nocks

Lighted Nocks | Practice with Them for Better Bow Hunting

Feature: Flatline Whitetails

Practice makes perfect, right? Isn’t that how the saying goes? Unfortunately, it’s only true to a certain extent. If you practice your archery hunting skills with sloppy form and different hunting gear than you’ll use in the field, you’re really just setting yourself up for failure. But you’ve no doubt heard the adapted version of this phrase too: perfect practice makes perfect. The better and more realistic you are in practice, the better you should be at the real thing. This is why you should be using lighted nocks on your arrows as you practice this spring and summer. But let’s back up a little bit first.

Using the right hunting gear helps ensure that you’re ready for the real field conditions you’ll face. One, it simulates bow hunting on a very real level so you can get in the right mindset from the get-go. The more you get used to this simulation and the conditions, the more comfortable you’ll be in the field. Two, it helps develop muscle memory so that you will be freed up to think about the situation itself, and not worry about the shot mechanics. To that point, you’ll gain confidence in your hunting gear that you could only get from repeated usage of it. Different arrow nocks produce slightly different shots, so it makes sense that using a consistent nock will produce a more consistent and accurate flight path. If you use them from day one of practice, you shouldn’t have to adjust anything later. And finally, using lighted nocks for arrows in the preseason months helps you identify any form or gear issues before it can become a problem. If you start now, you literally have several months to tweak your gear or perfect your form. That’s much better than realizing it the week before opening day, isn’t it?

Why Should You Use Lighted Nocks?

If you don’t already use lighted nocks, you won’t believe what a game changer they are for hunting scenarios. Think about it – some of the best deer hunting action we face takes place in low light conditions (e.g., dawn, dusk, shaded woodlands, foggy/cloudy/rainy days, etc.). But knowing exactly where your arrow hits a deer in these low light hunting conditions is difficult to impossible. Will your knowledge of where it hit the deer in any way change the shot once you’ve released the arrow? Of course not. But it will really help you to know how to proceed from that point. For example, taking up the blood trail within 10 minutes in the case of a true heart or lung shot is fine, but it would be foolish in the case of a known gut shot. Illuminated nocks really help you weigh your options better to ensure you recover your deer.

The Nock Out® lighted nocks come in a few different options and are excellent additions to your archery supplies. The 3 pack is a great deal, as you’ll definitely want more than just one. Everyone has their own best lighted nock color that they prefer, but these ones come in green, yellow, or red colors. They all stand out extremely well when being fired on the back of an arrow through these low light conditions. If you’re not familiar with how they work, the sudden force of the bow string against the lighted nock when it is fired basically switches the powerful LED light on. To turn the light back off, simply pull the nock straight back until it clicks and the light goes off. They are built with bushings to fit the five most common carbon arrow shafts.

How Do Lighted Nocks Help in Practice?

Of course, practicing with these nocks in the preseason does help your archery form in a few ways too.

Taking time now to practice with lighted nocks on your arrows will help you get more confident in your archery equipment. As we said, practicing with the same gear you would use on a hunt helps you to be consistent over time. You can use these lighted nocks on your arrows during practice sessions by simply switching it to practice mode. This specific mode deactivates the LED light to save on battery life, and is turned on by rotating the activation collar. During most of the preseason and for daytime practice sessions, you have no real need to use the nock light. Therefore, you can easily switch to using this practice mode at these times. Though you’d be amazed how much they look like a rocket flying through the air even in daylight!

But once in a while, it helps to turn the practice mode off. Turn the light back on and take a few shots in low light conditions to get the real feel for it. You’ll be amazed at how well the arrow stands out after it’s released from your bow. It practically paints a line of light through the air on its way to the target. On spring and summer evenings, try setting a 3D deer archery target up at various distances in your yard, and dress up in your hunting clothing (yes, even if it’s 80 degrees out). The idea is to make your practice session feel as realistic and true to a hunt as possible. Raise, draw, and fire your bow as quietly, slowly, and stealthily as you can, just like you were in a tree stand or sitting in a ground blind. Then observe your arrow’s flight path, made easy by the bright LED light. Make any adjustments to your bow that you need to based on the first few practice sessions. Once it’s dialed in, continue with at least a weekly habit of dressing in your full hunting gear to repeat these realistic low-light shots. Come next fall, you’ll be amazed at how natural it feels to make them in a pinch.

BEST
LIGHTED NOCK
COLORS

If you’re not already using light up nocks, you really should be for the reasons listed above. Give them a try and see how it affects your hunting down the road.

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Tracking a Deer Blood Trail 101