Nature's sense of humor

CaliFFL

I don't know what plant this is, but it is maddening when chasing a blood trail.
That is not blood on the leaves and the plant is all over. 

bullsi1911

LOL

Yeah, we have a couple of plants with blood red leaves here that REALLY drive you nuts when tracking.  

Zee

Ha!

CHIRO1989

Dang, that would make tracking interesting...

zorba

Some kind of Holly?

CaliFFL

CHIRO1989 said:

Dang, that would make tracking interesting...

Yeah, you have to bend over and touch every red spattered leaf to verify if blood or not. The leaves above are wet with rain making the illusion 10X worse. 

CHIRO1989

CaliFFL said:

CHIRO1989 said:

Dang, that would make tracking interesting...

Yeah, you have to bend over and touch every red spattered leaf to verify if blood or not. The leaves above are wet with rain making the illusion 10X worse. 

Yeah rain, some urgency to the tracking to boot, good luck.

CaliFFL

zorba said:

Some kind of Holly?

That's what it looks like but my web searches verified nothing. 

Diver43

Are you sure it's not a fungus? Think they call it "leaf scorch"

orchidman

My guess is that it is Phacidium which is a fungus species which attacks tree leaves..

Heavily infected leaves drop prematurely from the trees in the spring. Phacidium species initially causes yellow spots on the leaves of American and English holly by late spring. During the summer the spots turn red-brown then develop the characteristic black tar spot by early fall.

Bummer if you have to track an animal ......

CaliFFL

I'm not sure it's not a fungus, but it doesn't feel like a fungus. There is no raised/rough area on the surface of the leaf.

GunNut

We had we had the same or very similar in the woods in New York.  Never noticed it until I had to help my neighbor track a deer.  Lord that sucked!

earlyagain

If there's a bunch of that stuff where you're hunting. You could always switch the 270 for something bigger.

CaliFFL

earlyagain said:

If there's a bunch of that stuff where you're hunting. You could always switch the 270 for something bigger.

Pay attention to the hunting threads, early.    My son shoots 270. I hunt big game with a  30-06 exclusively. 

This particular tracking event began with a 7mm-08 and a deer that was shot a bit too far back. The deer was recovered, no thanks to the red spattered foliage. 

earlyagain

I hope the bullets weren't coated with molybendoverlookingforsign disillusionment.

Six-Gun

I’ve seen and dealt with very similar hell while tracking deer in a couple of states.  It’s awful.  About the only thing worse is a full-blown downpour when the deer goes down out of sight.