Bavarian Mountain Hound, Heidi - 150m Tracking Shoe & Blood.

This was quite a milestone in our training. Heidi is now 14 weeks old, and this track was around 160m, and was just over an hour old. It was made by using tracking shoes and 250ml of diluted blood, some of the blood I dripped on to the cleaves, two or three times along the track, with a good dose at the start. The track itself was on the grass verge along our driveway, and because of wind direction and access, I drove her in the back of the truck to a point just before the track line started. Otherwise this would have meant walking down the driveway close and parallel to the laid track to the start, which I did not think was a good idea. It was also good to give her some experience of 'driving' to work, and did not phase her at all
Now again as you can see, she does not keep her nose down too much. The grass was fairly short and not very dense, and I wonder again if the scent laid with the shoes is strong enough that she doesn't need to, or if this is something that needs to be addressed in some way to avoid any problems in the future, such as missing turns etc.? If so I'm not quite sure how to correct that at the moment.
Once or twice she can be seen to come of the grass on to the driveway, and again I'm not sure why. There was a very slight breeze from right to left, but I can remember seeing a fox on the track line when I was laying it, and as you know the stink something terrible, so maybe that was the distraction.
We got to a left hand turn into a field entrance after about 130m, and again she picked this up better than I did, but the immediately went wide of the line and looked at me for a few seconds, then seemed to suss it out, got back on line and found her skin!

Age of track: 1hr 15mins
Length of Track: 160m.
Type of track: Shoe and blood.
Amount of blood: 250ml (Cleave juice diluted).
Wind direction: From the right
Wind strength: 3-6 mph
Temp: 15ºC
Weather: Damp, overcast.
Time: 17.30
Age of Dog: 14 weeks