Use Your Smart Phone While Tracking Wounded Game

A friend recently sent me a link to this video, and this seems like a great thing to share with y’all, especially this time of year as deer season approaches. Although it’s specifically touting an app called “onX Hunt,” the method being applied is sound and I’ve used it myself using a handheld GPS.

Say you’ve wounded an animal and it runs away. This is far from ideal, but if you hunt long enough it will happen to you. It can be very helpful to store waypoints along that trail, so you can refer back to it when you need to regroup.

Paired with topo maps, this can sometimes illustrate whether the animal was strong or becoming more weak as it traveled along the trail you’re taking. If it’s climbing, it’s probably strong. Walking along the same elevation or contour, it may be weakening. And moving downhill may very well indicate that your prey is weakening and will soon expire.

Sometimes there’s little or no blood or other sign to follow — most experienced hunters have been in that situation. When you need to simply search for an animal because you have no way to track it, recording your path on a map can help ensure you get good coverage of the entire area. See a gap in your grid pattern? Go check there, just in case.

Check out the video and see what you think. I have not used this app; have you? I would love to hear what other hunters think of it.

Russ Chastain

Editor & Contributing Writer Russ Chastain is a lifelong hunter and shooter who has spent his life learning about hunting, shooting, guns, ammunition, gunsmithing, reloading, and bullet casting. He started toting his own gun in the woods at age nine and he's pursued deer with rifles since 1982, so his hunting knowledge has been growing for more than three and a half decades. His desire and ability to share this knowledge with others has also grown, and Russ has been professionally writing and editing original hunting & shooting content since 1998. Russ Chastain has a passion for sharing accurate, honest, interesting hunting & shooting knowledge and stories with people of all skill levels.