Covered tracks

[Mike Leonard]

Now I know the term covered tracks usually means a track that a dog or dogs has already run. Most dogs will know if they have already covered a track and won't go back and re run it again or run over it. This thread is about a little different type covered track.
I work my young cat dogs year round, and I don't use traditional drags very much. When training for bobcat a traditional scent drag leaves to much contact scent and other than very young pups it is a bit too easy for them to trail. So I have another technique I use. I have a wooden dowel about four feet long, and I slip a small four inche paint roller cover over it lengthwise. I then put a very smal amount of Grawes bobcat training gland scent on the tip of this roller cover. Then wearing rubber boots I make a track, much like the pattern a bobcat would make going thru the country. Just step , step step, and occasionaly brushing on a twig , log, or rock. I may make these anywhere from 400 yards to four miles in length depending on the age or development level of the young dogs.
Well it's been pretty hot here close to 100 in the day but cooling down some in the evenings. So I got out early today and made a long track. I came back had some breakfast and then went back out with three young dogs. Now then they struck and moved it well, no problem even an 8 month old female who actually carried it in front most of the way. Part of the area I went across was a field of semi broken ground. That was arounf 8 this morning. So this evening after a day of pretty hot sunny weather around 93 deg. And pretty dry I would say but I don't know the humidity level, I went out to excercise the dog in the same area. Well as I said most won't re-run a covered track that they have trailed earlier. Maybe because I didn't have a tree reward, like a caged critter or somthing they still wanted to run it. So I let them go and they moved it as well as they had some 8 hours earlier, but here is the kicker. That field I talked about , well the man that owned it came out today with a tractor, and a disc, and turned that dirt all over and cut down the weeds that were present. I said to myself, those dogs will hit a brick wall when they get to that field.Well they did slow down a bit but they worked on across it without a loss. I have seen tracks covered by snow and dogs run them and you couldn't see a track but the insulating properties of the snow held the scent and still released it. Possibly some soils will do the same thing.

I was just wondering if any others out there had seen this happen?

[nightowl24]

a guy once suggested to me that sometimes dogs will pick up an old track(usually young dgos)and run it by memory. the really smart ones remember that you were really happy when they picked up that scent and ran it, so they try to make you happy again. if you take them back to the same area too quickly before that scent has a good long time to dissapate they will pick it up and when it goes cold the smart ones remember how they ran it last time, so when they hit a spot like you are talking they kinda breeze over it till they find where the scent is a little stronger and run it again.

my hound picked up a track 3 days after i had laid a coon drag for him. ran it to the same tree and everything. when he got to the tree he could tell the coon wasn't there, but was still looking for a reward. i posted and several people told me there was a possiblility that he ran the trail by memory...made sense to me and it kinda fits what you are talking about.

[Ike]

There is probably something to what nightowl24 has to say about a dog running from memory, as we all know a hound might come down it's back-trail from a lion or bear track two, three or four days later. It's hard for me to believe a pack of hounds trail themselves out four or five days later, so memory coming down a back-trail is certainly something to consider.

A good hound will trail a tom lion under fresh snow though, even when a guy can't see the track. Several years back, a tom lion crossed in the mud before it froze one evening and I went out to start the track around 09:00 AM. I had a buddy out there working and he'd cut the track that evening and called me on it. He also told me it started snowing around daylight and there was two to four inches of snow in the track when I arrived.

Most of that country was bone dry before the storm, as many of the south faces had bared off weeks ago. There was, however, snow along the north faces where I could find the dimples of the track filled with fresh snow. I put four dogs down the tracks and they were five or six hours jumping that old tom lion, as he'd laid up on a south face where his tracks were in the dirt covered with the fresh snow.

When we got to the tree, the snowflakes were as large as a quarter and I was surprised those dogs had finished the track. Running a snowed in track in snow is probably easier for a hound than running a snowed on track that was made in the dirt............

ike

[Mike Leonard]

I sure agree on the memory thing and that might have been part of it, but I did see those dogs really working and popping their noses as they went across that fresh dirt, but it may be they were just trying hard and still using memory.

I remember one time winter of 99-2000 I had a particular ranch in Colorado I was hunting.I would park my truck and trailer along a country road, then unload my horse and dogs and go down and thru a gate cross a little creek, and then head into the canyons. Well this main canyon had an old log ranch house in it that was abandoned and some old out buildings falling down in dis-repair. But on my first trip in there I had to ride right thru this narrow gulch to go by that cabin and it was a dark shadowy area, and there was a bit of old snow on the north facing side. Well a great big old tom lion had come across there going south. I saw the tracks before the dogs got to it, and I called them over to the spot. Right away they went to flagging their tails and bawling and away they went. Well the track was probably a week old by that time, and they ran it in the shade there, but as soon as it hit the top and the south slope it was gone, and we were out of luck. Well about once a week I would go in there, and everytime I crossed that creek I couldn't hold those dogs back away they would go to that old shaded gulch, and boo around a bit on that all wallered out snow, and then we would go on. Well I never did catch that tom but I did catch a few other lions and a nice bobcat in there, and then the guy who had the place got funny on me and said he didn't want anybody going in therer any more. I found out later he had a nephew that got a few dogs and he wanted him to catch that big lion because he saw the lion one time while setting on an elk stand. Wel they never caught anything , and a couple years later he found a couple of nice buck deer lion killed so he asked me to come back and hunt it.So this would have probably been the spring of 2004 I went in there. Some of the old dogs I had before had passed on, but I still had a couple of them left. Well we crossed that creek, and them dogs left out like it was just yesterday and headed up to the north slope of that gulch and were just pounding all over that ground looking for that track. Well it wan't there, but they sure remembered that place. So they do have a pretty good memory for such things.

[nightowl24]

to catch cats your dogs got to have some smarts, kind works against them sometimes(in situations like this). i try to never cut my dogs in the same exact area. if i cut my dog in the same place two times in a row, if he gets on track the first time he will try to run that same track i guess hoping he runs across a hotter track. it used to tick me off, but i finally decided my dog is smart so why get mad when he uses his brains. he wants an easy jump. when i got hunting with my friend the dogs know where the hogs bed, so if we cut in an area where they have catch bedded down hogs, they will go there first. that's pretty smart, i figure. sometimes you waist a little time at the beginning, but for my dog it gets him focused when he runs a track and it comes up empty. so i really don't mind...i think it gets his competitive juices flowing...lol