<Animal> in the forest cover quests: Take "forest" literally?

[PALU]

I just gave up on such a quest after having visited every tile in the search area, except the lake ones (but including the island ones in the lake).  However, the visibility in spruce forests is horrible, and the track area is rather small, so it's very easy to miss them.

Should "forest cover" be taken literally, such that the search can be "limited" to forest tiles?

[MrMotorhead]

I have done this quest twice and been (I feel) exceedingly fortunate each time.  Both times the animal was in a spruce mire.  The first run I had no idea what I was doing and I started using my tracking skill in the zoomed out map, and found fresh tracks for the reindeer doe.  The second time I was going in straight lines east to west on the zoomed in map and I ran across tracks very close to the middle of the search zone.  I had previously used tracking skill on the zoomed out map, so it seems that trick works only sometimes.

[PALU]

I've given up on searching on the overland map as it increases the search time by at least 50% and that kind of searching seems very unreliable despite a high skill anyway. I believe all my successful attempts at this infernal quest (about 3) were in forests, and probably spruce infested ones at that, but that's not a sufficient evidence to change the search strategy to only search in forests.
Your experience strengthens the theory that "forest" should be taken literally (on the other hand, I believe disoriented people quests where they've been released from the forest cover seem to be found mostly in open terrain, but on the other hand, it's hard to find anything in forests).