Bad shots happen. They are an unfortunate part of hunting. Maybe you misjudged the distance, maybe the animal jumped the string on the shot. Maybe there was an unseen limb or just simple buck fever. Sooner or later, every hunter is going to be faced with a difficult tracking job. You can either keep at it or give up. The hunters in this video decided to stay with it. While hunting on public land in Michigan, already a notoriously difficult place to hunt, one of them puts an arrow in a nice buck. Despite the mule kick, the shot is less than ideal. When the buck runs into a marshy area, the tracking job becomes next to impossible. After consulting with the DNR, the hunters decide to take an outside the box approach to finding the deer, the use of a drone.
These days, deer tracking dogs have become one of the big go-to solutions for recovering a deer where the blood trail has run out. Here, a drone managed to make the task that much easier. All the drone operator had to do was hover the drone over the spot to guide the hunters in to where the buck was laying. As you saw from the footage on the ground, the dampness of the marsh and the grasses growing throughout it made a difficult search for the deer. Sure, with enough determination, and a grid search, they probably would have found it anyway, but the drone made things a heck of a lot easier. It's worth noting that in the video's description that they say they trailed the deer over 400 yards before they finally lost blood.
I encountered a similar scenario with the buck I shot this season. I also had a liver hit that quit bleeding within the first 150 yards. I didn't have to resort to a drone to recover the animal, but it was an option I was considering in case the search got too difficult. I did have my DJI Spark on standby. I'm glad to see this idea works in case I ever have another difficult search. Just make sure you check your local laws and regulations first. A call to the game warden isn't a bad idea either. If legal, and you're not going to disturb other hunters, a drone proves to be a solid option for locating a deer on a difficult blood trail. It's at least an option to keep in mind the next time you're tracking a deer.
For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his Geocaching and Outdoors with Travis YouTube channels.
