how do you date hog tracks?

[cnh1294]

I got hog tracks everywhere, and i am having a hard time telling if the tracks dried in the sun or the hogs have not been around for a few days. how do you tell how old tracks are?  and how recent hogs were around

[Ditchdigger]

Sometimes it very hard to tell how old a track is, so I follow it for little way and the tracks will reveal if its fresh or not. In muddy areas they will stay fresh looking for several days,but if you trail it to different soil it will start to look older.  Digger

[oso45-70]

Cnh1292
If you follow long enough you will find some fresh scat, You might be able to figger out which way they are heading and follow them that way.
........................................Joe..............................................................

[huntsman]

A sticky business, to say the least. Very much depends on the conditions at the time you are looking. Generally, the drier things are (or have been), the less likely you are going to be able to put any kind of accurate date on things. There are too many variables with a given set of tracks to establish hard and fast rules. Things like soil type, moisture conditions over the last week or so, immediate moisture conditions, humidity changes since the track was formed, etc., all make aging tracks more art than science.

Occasionally, some conditions will allow you to make minute and/or hour estimates instead of days or weeks. For example, once I followed a fresh-looking track to a small pool of water. The track crossed the pool, and there was muddy water still spreading out in the clear pool. The track was just minutes old. This was an extremely rare condition that allowed me to pinpoint the track time very precisely.

Another time I found a train of tracks heading to one of my feeders. Each hog left a visible "dry" line through the tall grass, which was otherwise wet with dew that had formed only a few hours before. The tracks were anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours old. Judging by the crumbling edges of the wet imprints and some grass stems springing back up from them, I estimated the sign to be less than two hours old. Even with good, fresh sign and moist conditions, I still could do no better than a two-hour window.

[pigman]

Telling the age of sign, especially tracks depends on the area your in, type of ground and alike, climate etc.

I find the best way, whenever tracking is to look for sign, then scan for confirmatory sign. So if you have a track print that looks reasonably new, look for grass that has been trampled, moisture on foliage, overturned leaves or crap on the ground nearby (crap is the easyest way to tell age).  Sometimes, if your in sandy soil, the edges of the print will be rounded or have a buildup in them indicating the wind has taken the edge off, hence older.  Depending on where you are, sometimes, other foliage or leaves or  spiders webs will be in the print indicating it might be old.

At the end of the day, you need to look for different things in different areas and over time, if you track in same areas, you will become more tuned to that area  and the animals habits and will be able to tell how old things are and get a picture for whats going on. remember animals are creatures of habit and you can usually work out whats going on.

Tracking is an art and is improved only by practise and can be very rewarding if you actually find the mark you've been tracking

good luck

PIGMAN