10/18/2025
Continuing from yesterday’s post:
Many of you share similar thoughts to ours. While we do believe grid searching can reduce recovery rates due to ground disturbance, most experienced tracking dogs can work through that contamination with minimal impact.
What we suspect plays a bigger role is how grid searches often push wounded deer farther from the point of loss. Once bumped, a deer typically travels much farther, and occasionally in a completely different direction than before. This, we believe, is why drone recovery rates drop even more than dog recoveries after grid searches.
Drones usually rely on hunter input about the deer’s last known direction, so their search efforts are focused accordingly. If the deer changes course after being bumped, those searches may miss the mark. Additionally, drone recoveries are often limited by flight time and distance, whereas a dog can continue tracking as long as the handler and property boundaries allow.
Those are our working theories. What do you think? We’d love to hear from both tracking dog teams and thermal drone operators. Please keep it respectful as this discussion isn’t about criticizing any method, but about understanding what the data might be telling us.
