11/13/2025
My biggest buck drone-tracked this year, and my second biggest buck tracked in four seasons!
Meet “Dagger.” This track touched on every bullet point of why I got into tracking. 🦌✨
Connected with this hunter where he felt he made a good shot, but the blood trail disappeared after 150 yards within a primary searchable area of 70 acres, plus bonus acres if he was not in the primary area. The area was shaped like a boomerang or claw with a neighbor tucked right in its palm.
Signs pointed to a probable liver shot.
I show up at the meet spot as close to last blood as possible and meet this young man and his father. He had a concerned yet eager look on his face mixed with hope that I could pull this off for them. To both him and his son, this buck meant a lot. A lot of bonding went into hunting this buck between these two. I realized or was told that finding this buck would mean the world to them. ❤️🦌
No pressure. 😅
Immediately I set up the gear and made sure they understood where I was going to start searching and why, along with where they wanted my immediate focus to be. After a few sets of batteries of grid searching, we had already covered 60 percent of the primary area. Excitement turned to palpable doubt. Feeling that energy, I assured them how tenacious I am and that we still had plenty of searching left to go. I decided to go with my own next instinct and head two thirds of the way across the primary search area, which was about 1800 to 1900 feet away from where Dagger was shot.
A doe in the distance caught my eye, so I flew over there, which extended my starting point to about 2100 feet from where it was shot. Once the doe was identified, I spun around 180 degrees to go back to my starting point for the next segment of my grid searching. I immediately identified a thermal heat signature that us drone operator trackers know all too well, known as the death pose (legs out, head down). At this point, right before this moment, both father and son were feeling a little deflated, and I caught them off guard (especially dad) when I spun the remote around and showed him his son’s buck laying deceased.
When I tell you, this grown man was so shocked his face stayed like this 😲😯😲😮😲 while he tightly grabbed onto my arm and braced himself against my truck speechless for a solid five or six seconds. He was overcome. He hugged me and would not let go, and you could feel all the weight on his shoulders lifting off him and all the happiness and relief of the moment filling his soul. I am pretty sure all three of us got some dust in our eye for just a second. 😭❤️
Father and son tracks are some of my absolute favorites. My number one scoring buck that I tracked was a father son experience too. God rewards the family man apparently. 🙏🦌
If I ever forget what this deer looks like in my old age, I will never forget the reaction and embrace from his dad when we found it.
In the words of this young hunter: “We would have never found him without you.”
443-982-6782 based out of harford county.