Deer Tracks are Underrated Sign You Shouldn’t Ignore

I know successful hunters who pay little attention to rubs and scrapes. They make note of them, but they’re not hunting over them or making a game plan around rubs and scrapes. However, they hold big buck tracks in high esteem. Why? Because they can give you more precise details about a specific buck or an approximate class of deer.

They’re also more likely to point you in the right direction, whereas other deer sign or land features might serve as a red herring. In other words, tracks might be your best clues when it comes to hunting a big buck. Even if you aren’t tracking a buck through the snow, here are a few reasons why you should pay more attention to deer tracks.

Field edges, creek crossings, freshly pawed scrapes, and even ditches are great places to look for big deer tracks. Depending on where you find a set of tracks, you might be closer to the X than you think. Field edge tracks might not tell you more than you already know, unless you’re scouting for opening day. However, a pair of tracks at a specific creek crossing might clue you into a buck’s travel route, depending on its proximity to bedding.

Tracks in the ditch or close to roads can go either way. For instance, if you locate a crossing next to a road, you’re likely dealing with nighttime activity, though this isn’t always the case. Instead of making that assumption, you can hang a trail camera or throw an observation sit at that overlooked spot to see how it pans out.

My dad and I once hunted a lease where one of his buddies killed a good buck within a hundred yards of that club’s dirt road. He cut a set of tracks where that buck paralleled the dirt road and crossed on an old two-track, so he hung a camera and got pics of that deer crossing that very spot. One Saturday, he ended up killing that buck at 8:30 in the morning. There wasn’t a rub within a few hundred yards of that spot.

Like most deer sign, treat deer tracks as a starting point. It’s not enough to find a big one and call it a day. Consider the landscape and why that deer traveled through this specific spot. Was he headed to food? Leaving bedding? Does this specific spot offer screening cover for daytime travel? Does the direction of the track tell you anything about how the deer might have been using his nose or his eyes to navigate the landscape?

These are all questions you’ll want to consider as you try to interpret deer sign and formulate a plan for hunting. This rationalization is what separates most successful hunters from everyone else. Most people can find deer sign. Few hunters interpret it in a way that leads to a punched tag.

If you’re running trail cameras, especially cell cams, try to think outside the box when it comes to patterning deer. For instance, if you get a picture of a good buck at a creek crossing or scrape, do your best to go look in that spot for that deer’s track. Yes, you’ll have to make an educated guess at which track belongs to that buck, but if he’s in a tier of his own, that shouldn’t be hard.

Once you snap a picture of that deer’s track, you can backtrack it to where you think that deer travels. That way, if you come across that track again, you can confirm whether or not your hypothesis checks out. If you spot that track coming and going from a bedding area, I’d say you have a pretty good idea of that buck’s travel. That intel will also come in handy if you’re scouting in the same area and happen to stumble upon that track again. Tracks can give you more pieces of the puzzle than most hunters realize.

It’s that simple. Big tracks don’t necessarily translate to antler inches, but I’ve never seen a small deer make big tracks. The term “big” is relative, of course. Deer down South run a lot smaller than their northern counterparts, so a big track in Mississippi looks different from one in Wisconsin. When you see a splayed (walking) track that spans the width of your fingers, you should get excited, no matter where you hunt.