The BEST Tools for BLOOD TRACKING Deer! (& What DOESN'T WORK)

Hi, I'm Chris with Afflicted Broadheads, and today we're gonna talk about tracking gear and tips, so stay tuned. So there's a variety of different items that can really help you when it comes to tracking your deer. There's plenty of gimmicky things out there as well, but there's just some handy items that you may want to consider putting in your pack for tracking, and we'd just like to cover a few of them because it just may help you out. The first thing that I want to talk about is things I don't like. I'm not a fan of anything that glows in the dark that requires being charged by a light source or a battery. So a lot of guys like glow tape, and I use this for a lot of things, but I don't use it for tracking because it simply does not hold a charge, if you will, long enough to make it a good, successful product. There's other items as well that are made out of a similar material that glows in the dark that you can hang on your tree. Now, in the daylight, this might be kind of handy with a little arrow and kind of showing you where to go, but these glow in the dark, and at night, this only lasts about 20 minutes, and so that is really useless to you as a hunter if you have a long tracking job and you're trying to depend on something that is going to light the way, so to speak, and these just don't do the job. So I'm not a fan of glow-in-the-dark items that require being charged by a flashlight or a light source. I am also not a fan of any of the tracking lights. First of all, they're expensive, and I have fallen into that trap of trying them all. No matter what time, years ago, they came out with a new tracking light. I bought it hoping, because I have color blindness, that it would help me see red. None of them have ever worked, so I do not like the tracking lights. In fact, last week, I participated in an online survey where we were talking about the effectiveness of tracking lights. 95% of the people in that survey said they don't work for them. So if it works for you, great. That'd be a wonderful tool if it did work for you, but it doesn't work for me, and most people I talk to, they don't work for either, so when it comes to deciding whether you wanna spend all this money on a tracking light, you may wanna consider something else that's more beneficial. Now, while we're on the subject of lights, light and tracking at night, of course, is a big deal. You have to have plenty of light. I'm a big fan of the headlamps, and there's a million different varieties. I like a headlamp that I can not only adjust my beam, but that I can also adjust the light intensity. Now, this is important to me because some of these new LED bright white, I mean, that really bright white, I have trouble with that really bright white, and sometimes I'll go back to just a regular bulb flashlight because it helps me see that red a little bit better than this really bright white light, but there are so many of these, and they do work really well, and I like them for finding my way and for highlighting sign. One of the downsides of a lot of these headlamps is they eat batteries, so you want to make sure that in your pack you have backup batteries for all of your lights, and I also always put a spare light in there in case something goes wrong with this. There's nothing worse than being in the middle of a tracking job in the middle of nowhere, and now you have no light source, so it's a good idea to have a spare battery or a spare flashlight of some sort in your pack, and then definitely extra batteries for the light source that you are counting on, so a good thing to consider. One of the items that I use the most, it's really simple, you'll hear people talk about it all the time, is toilet paper, so I have two different colors here. It's the same stuff. It's really handy for marking your trail as you go. I like it because it's biodegradable. I don't have to always worry about going back and getting it all off of the branches, and it's highly visible. It's easy to see, and plus if you need to go to the bathroom, you have what you need, but toilet paper is a good way to mark your trail and mark your path as you go. Another item that I have found really handy for tracking at night especially are glow sticks. Now, I know that this sounds kind of strange, but at the dollar store, you get a 25-pack tube for a buck, so you can put two or three of these in your pack at very minimal cost. They're very bright. They do a great job. And you just crack them, and then they have a little piece that goes right here that holds them together on a ring, so you can hang this on branches. And this is really good for kind of getting an idea of how that deer is moving. You can look back, and you can see, okay, that deer is following this contour, and it may help you stay on the blood even better. And it's also a nice tool if you are taking kids with you for the first time. Maybe you're mentoring or teaching or you're having your kids with you or you're tracking your kid's deer. They can be in charge of breaking the glow sticks, and it actually adds an element of fun for them, of participation, and it kind of lets the serious down, the stress down a little bit and gives them something to concentrate on. So if you're mentoring youth or have youth with you, I highly recommend these, but I highly recommend them just for adults. I use them all the time, and they're very handy. Just make sure that when you're done tracking that you go back and pick them all up so you can throw them away because they are not biodegradable and you don't want to leave those hanging in the woods. Another item that I absolutely love and use every time are high intensity button lights. Now, there's several different designs. You can find them with clips. You can find them like this. This was originally designed to highlight your tree stand, and at night it's activated. So it glows a little tiny light only in dark hours. It has a little photo sensor in here, and these are fine. I've used them. I like them, but I like these little button lights that you can find at just about any store. They're usually in a six or an eight pack, and they are high intensity. They will go all night long, and you can see them for a really, really long way, and I will use these in conjunction with the glow sticks or any other thing that I am hanging, the toilet paper, whatever, to mark significant things. So like at the start, if I'm in an area that is really thick and I may have some trouble finding where I actually started, I'll put one of these at the start, and maybe I'll put another one where we found something significant, a bed, a lot of blood, something, a turn in the trail, something that marks maybe the last point of blood. So these nice little bright LEDs, you can see them from a long way, and you can put them up really high too so you don't have to have them at ground level so you can look up and really see them from a distance. So they seem to really help. Now, when it gets down to brass tacks and you're at that point of you're tracking and you are out of blood, you're starting to give up, you're starting to get frustrated, the product that works really good is hydrogen peroxide. Now, I don't use hydrogen peroxide along the whole path like some people like to do because there's a lot of false positives for hydrogen peroxide. Let me explain that. Sometimes a slug trail, a worm trail, even insect defecation or animal feces or other animal fluids will cause a reaction in the hydrogen peroxide and kind of send you off track. I don't break out the hydrogen peroxide until I'm at my wits end. So I got last blood, this is my last drop, I've done everywhere out front here, cannot find any more. The hydrogen peroxide will not only help you find those little traces of blood, but it will also react to serous fluid, white blood cells, things that your eye is not concentrating on. Really watery blood for gut shot tracking, hydrogen peroxide is the way to go. You'll see things that'll blow your mind because it's clear and you didn't realize, you know, maybe you were farther back than you really thought you were and this has kind of given you an idea. Well, maybe I should back out because I shot farther back and now you're not pushing that deer and you're giving them more time. So hydrogen peroxide really does work well. The last thing that I have in my pack, of course, is the assortment of all the things that I'm going to need because I used all this stuff to find the deer, right? So I have my dragging ropes and my extra things to get that deer out of the woods. So hope this was beneficial to you. Please subscribe. We've got some more awesome videos coming your way. Thanks for watching.