Archive → August, 2025
Dogs vs. Drones in deer recovery Part 2
So you hit a deer, with an arrow or a bullet, and it ran, and now you want to find it. As is common, the critter crossed paths with you and your sporting weapon late in the day (deer especially move most at dawn and dusk), and now the sun is setting and daylight is fading. Finding the trail and following it is becoming less and less likely. After ten or fifteen minutes of looking for it, the sun is down and all you know is that you have some blood at the initial point of contact. Yes, the deer jumped high, mule kicked, and tucked its tail as it ran, all of which are good signs of a solid hit. But, you don’t have much of a blood trail and no light to follow one, even if you could find the spoor.
Archery hunters commonly back off at this point, and either wait an hour or two before resuming the search in earnest, using strong lights and extra eyes from friends, or they just leave the site altogether. Returning in the morning provides better light for trailing, and the good likelihood that the deer will have run only a short distance, bedded down because it is wounded and does not feel pressured, and then expired.
But what if you are worried about coyotes eating your prize overnight? And what if you think the hit was really good, and the ground cover is just so thick and difficult that there is a good chance the deer is lying dead just fifty yards away, and yet tough to see from where it was hit? Faced with these prospects, a lot of hunters will go after the deer, good blood trail or not, good visibility, or not.
Comes the question, what is the best way to find this wounded and probably dead deer: Should you stagger about in thick thorns in the dark, losing half your own blood and clothing in the process? Or should you call in the cavalry?
Today, calling in the cavalry means either getting a deer tracking dog (www.unitedbloodtrackers.org here in central PA), or getting a drone operator. Using either dogs or drones is not necessarily permitted in all states. After a ton of political wrangling over a twenty or thirty year period, Pennsylvania only got search dogs for finding wounded deer less than ten years ago, while for hundreds of years many southern states still use dogs to chase deer to hunters. So one state is worried about disturbing the hunting woods at all, while another state is OK with basically setting the woods on fire… for hunting.
Today, using drones to find wounded or expired deer in Pennsylvania is unsettled business. In fact, it is a mess. Here, too.
That is because the PA Game Commission worries about the misuse of drones for unethically looking for wildlife to hunt (gaining an artificial advantage), for herding and moving wildlife, etc. Fair enough, but what about the states that do allow drone recovery? Are those states just made up of unethical slobs who could never do a good job hunting or managing wild game?
And what about all of the cool videos online that show guys using drones to successfully find expired deer in the most improbable places that would have never occurred to even the most experienced band of searchers, or that would not have been accessible to a dog and its handler?
No question about it, recovery drones are both cool new shiny technology, and largely successful.
Deer dogs have their noses and the guidance of their experienced owners, while drones have infrared and thermal cameras that can go over a lot of territory quickly, at night, and often see a warm carcass through cover while the hunter simply stands and watches the video feed. Drones can often do the hours of work of a tracking dog in just a few minutes. On the other hand, dogs can pick up a two day old scent and follow it to the long-cold carcass, something a drone cannot do, unless the carcass is out in the open. In which case it will be but a pile of fresh bones.
But there are real concerns about drones, like spooking and pushing out an entire herd of deer, maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, or looking too soon and unnecessarily pushing off the wounded animal to even farther distances, maybe over property lines. Some drone operators mount big flat screen TVs in their vehicles, so the drone search becomes less about recovery and more about entertainment and snooping on trophy deer at night. Some states require that the hunter who wounded the animal not be able to see the drone search results, to eliminate a possible inducement to cheat (like going after another, bigger, animal in the dark).
Of course, in places with big swamps, pythons, and alligators, a drone might be preferred!
One suggestion that Central Pennsylvania tracking dog handler Vicky Church has: Get deer/ game animal recovery drone operators certified. Not just by the FAA, but also by the PGC. Make sure that drone recovery operators are behaving ethically and legally. It is hard to argue with some version of this, even though I am philosophically opposed to any more regulation on our already far overburdened society.
Vicky says the deer dog people had to do it, so the drone people should, too. Hard to argue with her.
Hunting is supposed to be fun, and no wounded wild game animal should be abandoned to the coyotes just because search options were artificially limited by over-anxious regulators. My opinion is drones should be allowed for finding wounded wild game. But let’s face it, it is a lot more fun to watch a dog work the scent and the field.
Nothing beats the happy look of a smiling dog, or the people with it.
Wild Game recovery dog handler, Vicky Church. Photo by Tom, a hunter who benefited from Vicky’s help
Vicky and her dog trailing a wounded buck. Photo by Tom
No way a human is going to do this easily or well. Oh, many of us have tried it, without success. A drone might achieve this, if the cover is not too thick
Memes, memes, memes
seeing is…tasting?
I like to cook. In fact, about 42 years ago I was trained by Andy Zangrilli as a cook and chef, at his Highway Pizza and The Deli restaurants in State College. I am proud of this experience, because Andy took a doofus 18 year old kid and gave him (me) a valuable skill. To this very day, you can put me in a kitchen heretofore unknown to me, with a wide variety of ingredients, spices, herbs, whatever, and, assuming the kitchen has the necessary pots, pans, utensils, gas stove, etc, I will make you a meal that you will at the very least greatly enjoy, if not go crazy for. Spices are a big part of being able to impart certain flavors and nuances to anything we cook, boil, broil, simmer, etc., and thus an essential part of my cooking.
Thank you, Andy.
So as I still greatly enjoy cooking, spices are still my thing, and I use them liberally in almost every dish I make, sweet or savory. Several days ago I made an applesauce from our backyard’s sweet crabapples and granny smith apples. With very little sugar added, it needed something to keep its tartness from making people cry. And so some nutmeg and cinnamon were added, which made it “perfect” according to one shnarfling admirer. She could not stop eating it. Dad added a dollop of real maple syrup. Mom ate it straight.
Somehow over the past year or so, our home’s spice drawer has become ever more populated by bottles with odd, capricious, whimsical names. These names contrast like the Himalayas to the Appalachians, with the staid old “Paprika,” “Garlic Powder,” “Thyme,” “Rosemary,” “Basil” and so on. I do not recognize these things. Other than ketchup and pickle flavored spices, few of these newcomer spice bottle labels describe or even hint at what taste or flavor is expected from their contents.
Green Goddess? Is this a new superheroine? Everything but the Elote stumped me, because despite an A+ English vocabulary, I have no idea what an elote is. Which pisses me off and makes me think I don’t want to know. It must be useless. Aglio Olio? A spiced dry oil in a bottle…not OK, but rather weird and trying too hard to be different.
Multipurpose Umami sounds like a versatile American Indian tribe. And in my friend’s spice drawer in Denver last month, I encountered a huge number of similarly named mystery spices and flavorings that all emoted colors and activities, which in my 100% male brain do not connect to anything related to flavor or aroma. And in fact, it is his wife who has amassed this enormous collection of verbal creativity in a bottle.
I don’t think my friend uses anything but salt and pepper in his foods.
Most or even all of these appear to come from Trader Joe’s, that famous venue for posing, posturing, preening shoppers in tight yoga pants. And I think that is the ticket to understanding what is going on here with these weirdly mis-named bottles of flavorings: Girls/ women/ ladies/ female humans apparently are willing to have a fling with flavor. They are willing to just try something new and unexpected in their food experiences, because apparently the lack of rote routine meeting known expectations is stimulating.
Men, think about this.
Think hard.
If women are sprinkling a bottle called “Green Goddess” on their food, then what does that tell us about these women’s food experience? About how it makes them feel, like a goddess…
I am going to sign off here, stumped as I am. I confess, I am just a man; I can change, I suppose; if I have to (thank you to the Red Green Show).
Gotta go add some more of my home grown basil to the home grown tomato sauce I have simmering away on the stove right now. I know it will end up tasting delicious, because there is a nice linear straight-ass line from the basil to the flavor outcome. No mystery involved here, and I like it that way.
Mystery flavors in a bottle appeal to someone I am not, but I remain intrigued
Dogs vs. Drones in hunting recovery, part 1
If you hunt, you are going to end up tracking at some point.
Like it or not, even fatally hit deer, bear, especially elk, sheep, and other wild game animals can and often do run before they expire. Every single deer that I have shot through the heart has run at least 100 yards, sometimes two hundred, despite being mortally hit and having zero chance of recovering. Shot through the heart, a mammal is kaput, done for, 86ed, iced and dead. Nonetheless, all can run while the hydraulic fluid exits.
And the same holds true for animals hit through both lungs with an arrow, a shotgun slug, a bullet, a spear blade, or a round ball from a historic muzzleloader: All game animals can run, many will run, even while they are mortally hit and dying even more with each bound or step.
So, tracking hit game animals is as important a skill as is shooting them accurately with whatever your weapon of choice. Yes, deer often fall over and expire after being hit once, and that’s great if it happens for you. But for a lot of hunters, it just does not happen that way, and the critter runs a bit.
Depending upon the topography and ground cover of your happy hunting ground, your tracking job might be easy or it might be hard. Depending upon your tracking experience, your hunger pangs, your patience, your tiredness, and the amount of ground cover you have to fight your way through, this tracking job might be even harder.
When tracking gets hard to do, we hunters have four options: Call buddies to help us do a checkerboard search, use a buddy’s hunting dog to try to sniff out the hit animal, which rarely works in my experience, three use a drone with experienced operator, or four, bring in a dedicated tracking dog and handler.
Option one, hunting buddies, is the most common way to track down a hit animal. And it is generally successful. Most people just call in whoever is hunting with them, or whoever they know who is closest, and together they start on the expected path of the critter. Many hands make short work, and regardless of whether it is a night time recovery with headlamps or a brutal daytime slog busting through thorny brush, the more people a hunter has helping, the faster and better likelihood of success.
Option two, any dog, or even a “hunting” dog, almost never works. Yes, dogs can smell way better than us humans, but so what does that matter when the dog is excitedly sniffing and chasing every wild animal track it encounters? I recall using my friend’s duck dog to try to track down a gobbler whose head my Remington 870 had literally severed from its body. The headless beast ran unerringly straight across the field to the worst tangle of brambles, deadfalls, timber tops, regenerating forest, and Asian bittersweet on planet Earth, and then took wing. I have had some real bad luck with doorknob-dead turkeys running and flying away, but this one was the craziest example.
I drove to my friend’s house, got his dog Ori (my friend was at work), and drove back to the scene of first contact. Neck feathers and blood were all around where the load of #5s had separated the head from the body, and indeed, Ori started out strong there. She followed the running scent track into the jungle, and went into creep mode. Looked very promising. We stopped at a couple trees along our way, where she looked up the tree expectedly. I looked up too, because hey, I was just the puny human here among mystical animals with superhuman powers. I was just following directions.
Despite following a flight pattern, which has no scent that I can imagine, Ori took me on a pretty straight line through that jungle mess, that in fact directionally tracked with how the bird had run across the field. And also to her credit, at one tree blood and feathers showed where the turkey had crashed into the trunk. How she found that, I can’t imagine. At another tree, Ori found where the headless bird had lain or fallen at the base. I thought surely by now this bird is lying dead right around here. But the certainly dead turkey was nowhere to be found. Gone, vamoosed, vanished.
Another time, we used the purported “hunting” dog of the man whose son had hit a doe right before closing time. Scene of the hit was easy to see, and the initial tracking was easy. We hung bits of tissue paper along the blood trail and followed what projected as a straight death run.
Dark fell upon us, but blood was everywhere, the path seemed self evident, the deer was obviously hard hit, and our feeble head lamps gave us the impression that we could see. But no luck. The dog was then got from home and brought in. He started out on the actual blood trail, but then started going off in wide tangents. We quit at midnight, shaking our heads. When we returned the next morning, that damned dead doe was lying a few feet away from where several of us searchers, AND THAT DAMNED DOG, had walked many times the night before. It just blended in with the forest floor, and the dog’s nose never picked it up.
So, don’t waste your time with option two, a dog not trained to track wounded game, unless you enjoy telling hunting stories of woe and frustration.
Part Two on Dogs vs Drones coming up soon.