Tracking Devices, Or, Why a Dog Wears Three Collars

There is no way to minimize how important tracking & recover collars are to the sport of bear hunting.  As Jerry Sr put it, "before tracking collars, those old timers went into the woods for a looooong time."  Without these pieces of technology, bear hunting becomes nothing more than a specialty all but the most hearty of sportsmen would ever attempt.  No exaggeration.  These devices transformed the sport and created a doable endeavor.  Prior to tracking collars, the "old timers" would run all day in the woods, following dogs by the sound of the bark and hoping to retrieve their animals sometime within the next week.  In the old days, there were way fewer black bears, way more woods, and no coordinated communication.  It was nearly impossible.

Squiggy running the Garmin (above)

The first big evolution was the adaption of the telemetry collars.  Anybody who watched a National Geographic special as a kid can remember polar bears or mountain lions being tranquilized and having special collars put on so the scientists can track their movements.  The collar emits a pulse that a tracker can use to monitor movement of the animal.  They are not very sophisticated, distance is estimated by the loudness of the beep, and the general direction can be determined by pointing an antenna.   The big advantage of these collars is that the battery life is thousands of hours.  The animal is just as likely to die of old age before the battery runs out (that's a bit of an exaggeration but a fun story to tell).

Jeff Davis using the "Amish Tracker", the telemetry system.

Nobody is sure which clever hunter was the first but somebody stumbled upon the idea of putting these collars on the dogs doing the tracking as opposed to the animal being tracked.  That simple tweak created an industry / sport / lifestyle.

Pretty soon, the concept of keeping track of your dogs while they were in the woods become something mere mortals could do.  This doesn't mean it's easy, not by a long shot.  But the idea of getting all your dogs back at the end of the day was no longer the exception, it was the rule.  Getting the dogs back quicker means getting them back in the woods quicker, meaning more repetition, meaning better skilled hound hunters.  Jeff Davis cut his teeth on the telemetry trackers like everybody else. 

The real breakthrough came with the GPS tracking devices… the Garmin!  That's right, the company that makes those nifty mapping machines for your car created a device that can give some pretty detailed information from a collar.  Information such as exact location of the dog, direction of movement, a record of the movement, distance away, elevation, map overlay… you get the idea.  Everything!

Distance - The display screen has pictures of the dogs and each can be clicked on to determine how far they are from the hand held receiving device.  The distance is measured in yards, measured straight out "in the direction a crow flies," until they reach a mile.  This is when the distance is measured in decimals, ie. 1.0 miles, 1.3 miles and so on.

Terrain - The area topography maps are displayed.  The map overlay makes the tracking much easier.  Jeff knows the area so well, he knows each ridge and holler shown on the screen.

Road Maps - On the topography, road maps indicated where hunters can go to intercept a dog, or a bear chase.  Heading the dogs off helps keep the chase in the forest to enable the dogs a better chance of treeing a bear.

Treeing - The Garmin will beep and display "treed" when a dog has his front paws up on a tree, and hind legs on the ground.  If one dog is showing "treed," it is possible there is a bear in the tree.  When two or more dogs are showing "treed" in the same area, it is most likely a bear up a tree.  This is when Jeff or whoever is positioned closest to the treeing, will go in and look for themselves.

Garmin devices are one of our sponsors, and the latest innovation in tracking and treeing bears.  But there is another device that is on the cutting edge of actually seeing what the dogs sees...  That story is coming soon!