Mission
Our Mission is to Help You Recover Your Trophy
Imagine This:
You’re hunting in your favorite spot. It’s a beautiful day. An hour or so into sitting, your mind is just starting to wonder when you catch a glimpse of movement. You squint and lean forward slightly, staining to bring the blur into focus. Then you realize: It’s the deer everyone has been talking about this year. You had it on your trail cams. You’ve dreamt about it. And it walks right into your shot path.
You take a great shot, and the deer bounds away.
You’re pretty sure you made a good shot. But you didn’t see the deer collapse. As you sit, letting your adrenaline settle, you start to question yourself. Did you really make a great shot? What if you didn’t? Maybe that branch got in the way. Maybe the deer flinched just before the shot hit.
Now What?
You wonder “What do I do now?”
Most hunters know that you need to wait. But many questions remain: How long should I wait? When I investigate the hit site, what am I looking for? What does the sign tell me? Are there times where I should track fast and keep bumping the deer? Or should I always keep waiting as long as the deer is moving?
STOP. CHECK. PLAN.
The ZivaTrackerApp gives you all these answers. It is designed for those moments immediately after you made that shot.
The first thing you probably did after the shot was pull out your phone and text your buddies that you have one down. Perfect. After those texts, and BEFORE YOU LEAVE YOUR STAND, open the ZivaTrackerApp on your phone.
Answer the four simple, but powerful, interview questions while the event is clear in your mind. Use the ZivaTrackerApp’s shot placement grid to identify where you think your projectile entered. Review the “wound path” prediction. Look at the possible organs and bones in that “wound path.” Read the descriptions and see if they match your observations of the few seconds after the shot. Pull up the hair samples associated with “entry” and “exit” points on the grid. Concentrate on the “hit site” and take a mental note of its exact location. Even take a picture of where it is with your phone. NOW: Formulate a plan on your next action.
The best way to proceed is to recover exit hair from the “hit site.” If those samples match the picture on the ZivaTrackerApp, you know that your entries are accurate. If they are not similar, then you may want to re-run the scenario and adjust your recollection of the entry point or adjust the ground angle of the deer until you find hairs that match. In doing this, you may get a different “wound path” projection, with different tracking advice. Look around the hit site for blood or tissue evidence and compare those to pictures in the ZivaTrackerApp.
The information presented to you is the combined experience of hundreds of blood trackers on thousands of tracks. Trusting the advice here will increase your chances of a recovery substantially. There are two things you will regret if you act in haste:
1. You put a dazed and confused animal that is probably going to settle down in a short distance to take inventory of its wounds: into a completely different mode of, “flight for survival.” When an animal is in that mode there is very little it can’t physically do. In mere seconds it can be hundreds of yards away while leaving very little blood evidence to follow.
2. You risk contaminating the scent pool left by that animal, making it extraordinarily difficult for a canine tracker to sort out.
Even if you never intended on seeking the services of a blood tracking dog you should evaluate the possibility.
Every hunter I’ve met through my tracking services is in a state of regret, denial, or remorse because they haven’t located their trophy and their conscience is killing them. By following the suggestions in the ZivaTrackerApp, you can rest easier: Either because you are not exhausted by having to go for miles to find your deer, or you find comfort in the knowledge that you’ve done everything in your power to recover an animal that probably is still alive and running.
In case you decide to seek services of a blood tracking dog, I recommend United Blood Trackers (https://www.unitedbloodtrackers.org/)