With Red deer,an educated hunter can tell reasonably close the animals age,body condition,gender,mode of travel at the time,,,and quite a few other things that I'm not educated enough to read.
For myself,body condition,gender,and travel mode is enough.
For age,the amount the tracks index will tell if I'm looking at an old,young or middle aged animal.
The cant of the rear track as it indexs the front gives a very good indercation to body condition,because a fat animal will have slightly turned out rear hooves due to body fat in the middle regions tuning the hoof out slightly.A skinny animal will often have in turned rear hooves due to having little body fat.
A young animal will often over step the front hooves with the rear due to having a long skinny body and legs in comparison to an older animal.
The dew claws in Red deer mount more to the side in males, an directly on the rear on female animals,,plus a big Red stag has hooves almost 1 1/2 times the size of a similar aged Hind.
How their moving is pretty obvious,due to the length of stride an splay or depth.
Most of this is only of real use if the hunter is reasonably familar with both the area and it's animals,because both body types and terrain can change quite a bit with Red deer.
The one time I hunted Whitetail,I studied their sign a lot,but could only really tell differences between young,old and gender based on size alone.
Most of the time I only use tracks as an indercation of relitive time of passing and size.
As I walk in to an area I use tramping or hunter access tracks and always look for fresh sign or obvious animal tracks that havn't been used for a while,then I make a point of going back over it during the following days.
I've picked up a few animals by doing this over the years.
By back tracking fresh sign you can often find where an animal has fed in the resent past,an those are often good places to be early in the mornings or late in the evenings.
The value of tracks or other sign is of course always dependant on your location.
I usualy hunt very large tracts of native bush where I will be 2-8 hours off the road ends,so I place a lot of value on any hint or clue I can find then.
If I was hunting farming country for something like Fallow deer,the whole game changes and ground sign isn't of the same importance because where they were yesterday is where they will be today,and the land owner will always know where they are from day to day anyway.
The other deer spieces here all have their own particular habits,their own type of terrain and habitat,,,an their all hunted slightly differently from one another,,for some good ground sign is vital,,others not so important.
Topic: ..... worth of deer tracks (Read 779 times)
