Hello Deer! Are you home?

X-farmerdan

X-farmerdan

Well-Known Member
I'm totally fascinated by deer movement. Where's home? How far do you go? When do you go and how long do you stay?

All these questions have been the subject of much observation, conversation and conjecture.

For a number of years, Penn State has been following deer captured and then collared with GPS transmitters. You have to understand, my life is at the intersection of agriculture, forestry, conservation, GIS, and GPS. So, the deer movement studies just awe me!

Here's a link to the latest little tidbit extracted from a large body of data. As is always the case when the results of a well designed study conflict one's actual beliefs, well, you know the rest of the story.

I was a little surprised here....http://ecosystems.psu.edu/research/...Feed:+deer-forest-blog+(The+Deer-Forest+Blog)
 
She found that deer move more on a new moon, although a very insignificant six steps more out of hundreds of steps a day average.
But those six steps become significant if they take the deer into the middle of your shooting lane.
And the study was only conducted on antlerless deer. What do we care about that. We all know that big buck is on his feet all day when the moon is right (tongue in cheek)
 
Interesting to see. I know there are those that swear by the moon phase and others that think it is total BS. All I know is that the more I dug into it and tried to tie it all together the more frustrated I got. So now I hunt when I can and when I feel the time is right. Deer have adapted over thousands if not millions of years - there isn't going to be a written in stone rule about a critter that has survived that long. IF they where that predictable....they wouldn't call it "hunting".
 
I'm amazed at how little they move in general. The moons effect (or non-effect) is slightly surprising. But it's good for me to remember they really are home body animals.
 
This is the conundrum of science. The sample population is does. The time frame is October. The locations are two Pennsylvania State Forests. The setting is not described, but it's mountainous and the land cover is largely mature forest with patches of succession where timber has been cut recently (best I can remember). And, there's nothing wrong with any of that. The question, though, is what inferences can be made about how this finding might apply to your or others time and place.

It's a piece of solid information from a well designed and interpreted investigation. It's not the last word. It just might be the first! Now, we need to find other studies similar in integrity to see if all the clues start to line-up.
 
I would like to see one in farm country. My area is night and day different from PA state forest ground. Deer in my area travel a long long way in a 24 hour period. But I do believe the moon has a lot to do with deer movement. Especially older deer.
 
I am likewise fascinated by deer movement. If you come up with any more good studies please post them.

I had something happen last year that amazed me. A deer that disappeared as a 3 year old returned for a short time as a 6 year old. I just can't believe that happens much. I would love to know the details but likely never will.
 
Yrs ago I was running a camera on a feeder in a high pressure hunting area in a state that you could hunt over bait. A nice eight point with a broken off tip was coming every evening for two years, then, the second week of archery season he failed to show and I assumed that he got shot. He never came in again even one time until four months later, on the last evening of the season he showed up like he'd never been gone, and continued coming all next year. All that I could figure out is he ignored fresh corn and went to a wildlife sanctuary three miles away. Where do nice bucks disappear to during the season?
 
Once hormones enter the picture, good luck trying to "explain" something. One of my professors at Clemson in the Bio-Sci department used to say "nature mocks human categories", the more time i spend in the wild, the more i see what he meant.

Doe movement is very interesting to me as it seems to be more consistent with food, bedding, water through out the year. Thinking about what my bucks are doing throughout the calendar year can drive me crazy.
 
Studies like this are Awesome, I just wish they didn't make my head spin with more questions than I had to start with.

I'm just thinking out loud here, but for me, the doe movement study kind of explains the October lull. As slow as they were moving, I can picture them casually feeding on acorns, with no real destination in mind. Thats probably about the speed that I would go if I was picking blackberries.
 
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Native Hunter said:
I am likewise fascinated by deer movement. If you come up with any more good studies please post them.

I had something happen last year that amazed me. A deer that disappeared as a 3 year old returned for a short time as a 6 year old. I just can't believe that happens much. I would love to know the details but likely never will.
Click to expand...

Like Don Higgins or not he has wrote about this a few times and talked about it in his seminars. He has come up with the theory that a buck will do the exact same thing every year on or close to the exact same day. Which I believe is where we see these deer that we believe disappear then reappear. They might possibly be deer that do not live on us but travel to our properties at different times of the year whether that be for a certain food or certain doe to breed. Deer do some crazy things. I have had this happen to where a big deer I hunted one year disappeared for two years and I believed him to be dead then all of a sudden there he was again no rhyme or reason but around the same time of year. I didn't document it at the time but now I am starting to pay closer attention to these things and document. Could be the difference at getting a shot at a target deer I have history with or never seeing him again.
 
https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/ar...rposeful-wanderings-mate-search-strategies-of
Native Hunter said:
I am likewise fascinated by deer movement. If you come up with any more good studies please post them.

I had something happen last year that amazed me. A deer that disappeared as a 3 year old returned for a short time as a 6 year old. I just can't believe that happens much. I would love to know the details but likely never will.
Click to expand...

This one is a fun read:
http://www.deeranddeerhunting.com/article-index/road-warriors-deer-go
It talks about bucks, home ranges, and these long-distance excursion they infrequently make.

This one you need to work at to understand. It's a journal article about movement of bucks and does during the rut.
It's a difficult read.
https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/ar...rposeful-wanderings-mate-search-strategies-of
 
Blizzard Ridge said:
Like Don Higgins or not he has wrote about this a few times and talked about it in his seminars. He has come up with the theory that a buck will do the exact same thing every year on or close to the exact same day. Which I believe is where we see these deer that we believe disappear then reappear. They might possibly be deer that do not live on us but travel to our properties at different times of the year whether that be for a certain food or certain doe to breed. Deer do some crazy things. I have had this happen to where a big deer I hunted one year disappeared for two years and I believed him to be dead then all of a sudden there he was again no rhyme or reason but around the same time of year. I didn't document it at the time but now I am starting to pay closer attention to these things and document. Could be the difference at getting a shot at a target deer I have history with or never seeing him again.
Click to expand...

There is more to the story I told about the deer that disappeared for 3 years that supports that theory.

The first time that deer appeared here he was an obvious 2 year old. But he was noticeable because he had tines at least 10 inches long. That's not common for a young deer around here.

That year he also had a broken left beam just out past the G2. When he came back as a 3 year old I got to thinking - this is about when he showed up last year. I pulled up the old pictures, and sure enough, it was 2 days difference.

When he showed back up last year as a 6 year old it seemed several days off, but I forgot that I had 2 cameras on the east side of the place that I hadn't checked. When I checked them - there he was. First pics of him were only 4 or 5 days off from the previous years.

Now I believe that during the two absent years that he was probably right here at those times but failed to walk in front of a camera.

BTW - Each year he came for the second rut.
 
Here are a few articles that might be of interest.
Measuring Fine-Scale White-Tailed Deer Movements and Environmental Influences Using GPS Collars
Spatiotemporal variations in resources affect activity and movement patterns of white-tailed deer at high density
Movement with the Moon: White-tailed Deer Activity and Solunar Events
Size and Fidelity of Home Ranges of Male White-Tailed Deer in Southern Texas
Investigation of Adult Male White-Tailed Deer Excursions Outside Their Home Range
Impact of Hunting Pressure on Adult Male White-tailed Deer Behavior
These are research articles so they are technical and a little boring. They are good to read late at night if you have trouble falling asleep. I usually just read the abstract, introduction and discussion. I would love to find a study that GPS tracked deer on a 15 minute interval to plot their home ranges and then the researchers went back and did habitat mapping to find out the types of plants, trees, and features where the deer spent the majority of their time. That would be an interesting project to me.
 
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Native - that is exactly what I am finding too. Deer do some crazy things. I am guessing you are correct and that deer did his same thing every year on your farm. Back in 2009 I was hunting a buck that I thought would go in the mid 180's, in 2010 I got on this deer. I had multiple encounters and should have killed him with bow and definitely with a gun. I had him at 5 yards sitting on the ground and my shotgun did not fire. Needless to say I gave up shooting the Remington Copper Solid Slugs and Remington received a nasty letter and a few phone calls from me. The deer I was hunting I believed to be well over 200" typical. I also have pictures that would suggest that I was correct about him being that big.

Back to the theory, in 2011 I never saw this deer again, never a picture again, it was like he vanished. I quit running camera's on that farm because I believed the deer died of old age and his rack was never found. He was the type of deer if he was found dead, people would be talking about him. Now that I have learned this theory about deer that have these odd yearly travel patterns I am guessing this deer was back and active on my dad's farm every year around the same time until he did finally die of old age or was killed after his rack had gone down hill. I sure wish I knew then what I know now.
 
Blizzard Ridge and Native - It looks like you are seeing exactly what the researchers here saw. Investigation of Adult Male White-Tailed Deer Excursions Outside Their Home Range On the 32 bucks that they tracked, they stated that "Sixty-three percent of adult males made at least one excursion outside their home range immediately before or during breeding season. Based on the seasonal timing of excursions, breeding-season-related motives were likely the driving force behind the majority of adult male White-tailed Deer excursions, whereas hunting pressure and food resources were not a probable cause." Apparently these bucks were looking for love and your hunting properties were just outside of their normal home range.
 
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