Determination on a blood trail leads to success
When you talk about hunting hotspots, not many folks will mention San Diego County. In fact if you look at the success rates, it would be one of your last picks for a place to hunt, much less bowhunt for mule deer. Nate Treadwell, bucked the odds and applied for an either sex tag near his hometown where hunter success is only 6 percent. It took his first year of hunting five years ago to figure out that traditional mule deer hunting tactics were not going to cut it. He started employing a tree stand and whitetail tactics, and for the last 4 years he has been successful.
If you have ever met Nate you know he is a persistant and driven individual. He put in the time to scout and find where the deer are travelling. He even took along John, a buddy new to the sport of bowhunting with the hope of showing him the finer points of deer hunting and blood trailing.
When the doe strolled into range Nate made the shot, and knew it was farther back than he intended. So after waiting, he and John began the tracking job. Nate recounted to me a lesson he imparted to John as they took up the sparse bloodtrail.
I called my buddy John Laraia over to show him an almost invisible speck of blood on a flake of red cedar bark. The only way I was able to spot it was because there were a few ants on the drop and a couple flies buzzing around on it too.
We were on the blood for about 60-70- yards when it just quit. The trail she was on split into two forks. We each took a fork and crawled on our hands and knees for a couple hundred yards, finding nothing. 2 hours later we were about to go home (65 mi each way), get more guys, come back and grid out over the hillside. I wanted to take one last look at the spot of last blood. We went back and when glancing a few feet off the game trail she had been on I spotted a 1/8” speck of blood where she went over a log. She had veered off the trail and gone downhill. Now that we were lined out we found a few more specks of blood. Then she came to a large meadow and we were stumped. No tracks, no blood. We had no idea where she went. We were standing on the edge of the meadow thinking “what now”. We grid out and look all over. We checked all the trails for several hundred yards on the far side of the meadow. Nothing.
3hrs+ later we were about to give up when John suggested we take one more sweep through some tall grass out in the meadow. We’d already looked through it a couple times. John went right and I went left. He found one fresh track in a spot of bare dirt in the grass in the middle of the meadow. He then took what he called the “path of least resistance” through the grass when he heard and then saw a swarm of flies over a dry creek bed. He remembered what I said about insects on blood and veered over to investigate. He took a few steps closer and found her stone dead. We had walked within yards of her several times.
So after a three and a half hour tracking job, Nate recovered his mortally hit doe. While the hit wasn’t textbook, it was lethal and did the job. It’s situations like this that you don’t want to wonder “is my broadhead sharp enough?” . A sharp broadhead combined with the grit and gumption to work out the trail resulted in a doe where 94% of tags go unfilled. The fact that he was able to give a newcomer to the sport a hands on lesson in the work after the shot, makes this more special.
