BigGameHoundsmen.com

I live and hunt in N.E Pennsylvania I by far don't have the best hounds nor do I think I'm the best hunter but I have saw my lead dog take a 24 hour old track and put it to a tree however it was A 4HOUR long cold trail in which she more than likely used her eyes for most of this, with that being said the oldest track I've ever seen her take with confidence on bare ground on 2 hours old. I believe it takes a lot more than a nose to cold trail I think they need a brain as well. With that being said I have my own question that has been brought up a million times directed towards the walker guys but anyone can chime in, what is your favorite blood line for cats, mine is a cross between finley river and clover that's what I prefer.

I don't pay much attention to the age of a track or trying to guess how old the track is. Cause one day that tracks old due to conditions next time different conditions that tracks a screamer. Snow I just throw them on just about every single one I come across unless I seen it the day before. Don't know till you test it. I don't play favorites on dog color or lines, I just hunt what catches game.

I like a cold nosed hound and have hunted bobcat on dirt for many ,many years .I believe if you were to try Marks experiment you'd find that most dogs would never know a cat had been there.From my own experience i believe a really good hound can take a 8 to 10 hour old cat track and i think that's probably pushing the limit.Scenting conditions determine just how old of a track a dog can work,that and the individual dogs nose .In snow a hound can work a track many ,many times older than he can on dirt . I've always felt( rightly or wrongly ) that if a hound could smell a 24 hour old bobcat track on dirt you'd never have any trouble finding a cat to run .

You expressed what I was thinking Robin. If you could run a 24 hour old track you could run a cat every day all day long. With my dogs I would guess just a couple hours on dirt. With snow it could be up to 24 hours with perfect conditions. Our snow is so weird some times only a 4 to 6 hour old track is impossible. I'm like merlo in snow I try every track I see.

Mic O'Brien

catdog360 wrote:You expressed what I was thinking Robin. If you could run a 24 hour old track you could run a cat every day all day long. With my dogs I would guess just a couple hours on dirt. With snow it could be up to 24 hours with perfect conditions. Our snow is so weird some times only a 4 to 6 hour old track is impossible. I'm like merlo in snow I try every track I see.

Mic O'Brien

1bludawg wrote:I like a cold nosed hound and have hunted bobcat on dirt for many ,many years .I believe if you were to try Marks experiment you'd find that most dogs would never know a cat had been there.From my own experience i believe a really good hound can take a 8 to 10 hour old cat track and i think that's probably pushing the limit.Scenting conditions determine just how old of a track a dog can work,that and the individual dogs nose .In snow a hound can work a track many ,many times older than he can on dirt . I've always felt( rightly or wrongly ) that if a hound could smell a 24 hour old bobcat track on dirt you'd never have any trouble finding a cat to run .

Some very valid points Robin & Mic.
I just returned home from two days in Central Oregon and two things were missing, snow and bobcat hunters! I suspect many of the guys who run bobcats only with there snow hounds have way colder nosed hounds than mine, or do they? I too think under certain snow conditions a hound can run a way, way colder/older track too than if made on bare ground, but what type of bare ground? I have seen this country dry out and you blow dust (probably why most don't bother hunting bare ground there) Usually this location would only be accessible by snowmobile only or it would be frozen rock solid and the last two days was very similar to Western Oregon, look at the mud tracks made by the quad. Too many variables to make an accurate guess along with certain bobcat tracks made with situations such as a tom bobcat looking for a mate and long gone that you could have trailed and did with solid under brush and good damp pine needles until it walked a mile on a gravel road, while another just made a kill and laid up a few hundred yards off the road you jumped and treed.... I just figure if I keep after it, even a blind squirrel will find a nut once in a while.

when I was younger I could tell you exactly what a dog could or would do in any situation...now I am older and seen way too many crazy things to say much more than if my dogs can trail it, I let them do it. if not, I move on and find one that they can run. I get a lot of pms about the nose on my curs and I tell most that I honestly don't know and I don't see much difference than the hounds ive owned some are better than others. I seldom find myself wishing in had colder nosed dog tho.

Dan McDonough wrote:With Garmins, trucks and shockers, are there really very many foot hunters left anymore?

Dan I'm not sure if it is the gadget thing or just plain lazyness. From my experience it is how I have developed my best cold trailing hounds. I am yet to have a year old cold trailer myself. Most seem to start around two and get better with age. No bobcats here just cougars and coons. Can't run coons at night so most coon trails are cold.

I think a cold nosed dog is just a dog that has more track smarts or a dog that has more desire to move the track giving the tracks age. I don't know if I believe that one hound has that much better of a nose then the other. JMO... I think some cold trailers are born and some are made and some just never care to get better what ever the reason may be. I do think if you walked out tracks like Hounddogger you'r going to end up with cold trailers some better then others but most if not all will cold trail a cold track. I don't feed any pup's in during a race every dog starts at the same time. Some time's I will hold a couple older one's back to let the young one's follow one old one as soon as they open then the rest of the poop's get to join.

Tim is right about conditions being everything. It seems to my like certain conditions hold the scent better. Everyone talks about how good the scenting conditions are on the wet coast where I hunt the most. And it is true on a hot track. The moisture releases the scent quicker. But the quicker it is released the quicker it is gone. Like turning your flash light on high. It is great while it last. But gone quicker. Wind and heat also wipe out the scent. Freezing conditions seem to hold the scent in place and not release it until it thaws out. I was hunting in the desert this winter. First time I have done that. So a lot of guys can speak to it better than me. There was recent snow when we arrived. The first day a few cats had moved and we treed one. Thinking the grass is greener we switched areas to an area our friend had seen several cat tracks a few days before. Nothing had moved in that area. So next day we are back to the first spot. Cat tracks everywhere. All had moved the day before. Conditions were that the snow had started to melt the day before and froze down around singe digits that night. All tracks were slightly melted so had been made the day or evening before it froze that night. Our friend walked a small track out and got his dogs trailing on it. In the mean time we found a larger track that our dogs could barley smell. The trailed down to a mainline and we could see the track going through a culvert out into a field with horses so we grabbed them and went on hunting( this was a bout 8 or 9 am.) it was still frozen. About 1 pm and three miles away we found another large track. Walked it out and the dogs started moving it pretty good. Good enough they should catch it. About 2 or 3pm we stopped them in the road where we could barely move the track in the am. Same track that had been made close to twenty four hours earlier. Scent was just released next day when sun came out. On the coast or cascades with no snow or freezing, the track would not have been runnable from 15 min. to 6 hours depending on the conditions.

When I'm scrolling these sites and viewing pictures and reading stories the first thing I do is look at the background of the pictures with the cats. If I see snow conditions I immediately become less impressed. I have never caught anything in the snow so I'm probably wrong to judge but its just my nature. We'd need a BIG sack of flour to cut a track and help the dogs trail it around here. One thing is out of the question when you put a dog on a snow track and that's direction. Regardless of the age the dog will be pointed the proper direction from the truck. Another thing is I can only imagine a dog with any sense at all can learn to look at a track in the snow and follow it and even though he may be opening doesn't mean he could trail it and jump it with out the luxury of seeing the track. If you dogs aren't trailing these track in the dirt then it don't mean much to me. JMO I am a huge skeptic of a dog that can take a 12 hr track consistently. They are kind of like "bigfoot" around here, heard about them but NEVER seen him.

Had a guy put his dog down on a track in snow and he couldn't take it 20 yds. I put my female down and she took and jumped it. Well, this guy tells me she was just sighting the track. I responded with if she is sighting the track, why didn't she take the 100's of deer tracks she passed over? Around here, a cat cold track will take you through every deer yard in the area, down countless deer runways, cold tracking has little to do with following a track in the snow. A man would loose most tracks within 100 yds and wouldn't be able to figure out where it went. On the rare occasion the cat goes into an area with little to no deer activity, sure, it can seem easy.

Oconee Plotts wrote: If you dogs aren't trailing these track in the dirt then it don't mean much to me. JMO .

LOTS of times scenting conditions are WAY better when there is no snow on the ground. Dry 'sugary' snow doesn't hold scent very well at all.
A dog can use his eyes until it gets in with a bunch of other critters, than it doesn't do the dog much good.

Just another way to look at things.

But yeah, going out after a fresh snow sure takes some guess work outta things.


damn I was typing this at the same time as Mondo...

How old a track can a dog run? It is all in the conditions no matter if in snow or on bare ground. Wind,rain, snow, brush, rocks, sand, 20 below or 80 above, melting snow, sugar snow. I have seen dogs trail and tree 24 hour tracks and not take one that ran across the road in front of me. Until I can see or smell scent or the dogs can talk what I think I am just making it up based on years of hunting. It is just a guess as to what really goes on out there with scent and dogs trailing. I think how a dog reacts to scent and is conditioned to do so is what makes the difference in their ability to trail cats. Where can one find the books on scent and trailing it sounds like it could be a good one to read. Dewey

X2

Dewey pretty much summed it up. Once again, I have never caught anything in the snow and for that matter have never caught a bobcat, but I am intrigued with the sport and wonder why a "dirt" lion/bobcat dog is priced 2-3 times what a "snow" dog is usually priced if the snow is NOT such an advantage, as some of you guys suggest?