a guy owns about 5 miles of old railroad grade , about every mile there is a sandy spot that is all tore up an tracks all over a ten foot circle , no hair on blood , I have never seen this before

we drove thru there the day before an there were no tracks

salt and sand mixture stored there years ago maybe.

That's what I was thinking, some chemical or something in the dirt that they like.

X 3

Most likely some sort of mineral there. That is what deer digs look like both man-made and natural.

On the farm I hunt in Illinois there's a railroad track runs on the west side of the property and I use it to sneak into one of my stands, last year on my way in I stumbled upon a place where one of the grain cars had lost a ton of corn. Needless to say I moved my stand and it paid off.😉

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these rail road tracks [grade] have not had a train or rails on them in 40+ years ,

Look close for bottom teeth marks where deer scoop up dirt. We had a farm which was mostly red clay which is pretty barren of micro-nutrients apparently. There was one draw which had a seep which was wet, and the deer were eating the red clay like it was made out of candy. You could see many spots where they scooped the clay up leaving a perfect imprint of their bottom teeth in the soil.