Trail-cam study homes in on buck-movement patterns

Five months of trail-camera photos, extensive weather data, gave the author a thorough picture of buck movement on his hunting property. What can you glean from it?

The extreme cold weather that entered central Mississippi this past February caused me to reflect on some very interesting work I did a few years ago regarding buck movement and temperature.

What did I learn from an intensive trail-camera study on my hunting property during the core of the 2008-2009 deer season? I didn’t set out to analyze buck-movement patterns during the rut, but while enjoying the use of digital trail cameras, the project found me. As an engineer, I have always been intrigued by numbers and statistics, but as far as my passion for deer hunting, the thought never struck me early on that my extensive collection of trail-cam photos might one day be an invaluable resource for analyzing buck movement patterns.

My hunting property was in the lower half of the Big Black River Basin, referred to in some circles as the Big Black Corridor. This particular river basin, encompassing an 11-county area, has earned a reputation over the years for its production of trophy class whitetail bucks. The area has historically yielded about one-third of the top-scoring bucks taken in Mississippi. This particular property contained a uniquely diverse habitat that included a creekbottom flood-plain, thickets of heavy cover, fields and food plots, water sources and heavily wooded upland hills and hollows. In other words, it was an ideal place to observe a wide cross-section of buck movement tendencies. 

Knowing where bucks are before the season is great, but not nearly as important as knowing where they’ll be during the rut.

Sweat the details

Being a detail guy, I have always carefully set up my annual trail-cam web, and without exception, preserved and cataloged all of my trail-cam photos. To that end, with no preconceived idea of the results, I set out to catalog, identify and sort my trail-cam photo data from the 2008-2009 deer season to see what it might reveal. During that particular season, I had a continuous camera spread that yielded several hundred buck “data points.”

According to the author’s data on buck movement, you’d better be in your stand when cool to cold weather arrives during the rut.

I am well aware that many hunters would rather get a root canal than deal with several months of trail-camera photos, collected, cataloged and analyzed. The good news is, I have already done the work, and I’ll bet that at a minimum, you will anecdotally see connections to your own observations of buck movement gleaned from both deer stand and trail-cam pics.

As it turned out, my trail cameras did a respectable job of chronicling buck movement, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, rain or shine. The various observations and conclusions that were ultimately drawn should not be considered absolutes, but rather indicators of repetitive tendencies and preferences of bucks during the rut. 

Over the years I have learned by trial-and-error where the best buck travel corridors are located, what food plots bucks tend to frequent during the pre-rut, and which scrapes and scrape lines are primary, perennial ones. This knowledge allows a hunter or land manager to place a series of trail cams in a way that will yield the most-efficient and effective results. 

During the early pre-rut, my cameras were placed to watch known, heavily traveled buck corridors. Then, at the first sign of scraping activity at several known perennial scrape locations, I relocated certain trail cameras to monitor primary scrape-line activity. In my experience, placing cameras at primary scrape-line locations has, over time, proven to be the best way to monitor and assess the bucks that use your property during the rut.

Span the entire rut

With all of my cameras in place and operating properly, I began the buck-movement study on Oct. 20, 2008, and concluded it on March 20, 2009. The study spanned a 5-month period that included the pre-rut, seeking, chasing, breeding  and post-rut periods. More than 300 buck data points were amassed. For each “buck observation data point,” the date, time and relative age-class of each observed buck was carefully recorded. Regarding relative-age class, the most accurate method was to segregate the buck data points into two age classifications: immature for 1½- to 2½-year-old bucks and mature for all bucks identified as 3½ years or older. 

The data was then sliced, diced and sorted to see what it might yield. Some of the findings are quite surprising and enlightening, while others are in conformance with conventional deer wisdom. While I do not consider the results of this study to be revolutionary from the standpoint of deer science, it definitely indicates buck-movement tendencies that are directly applicable to my hunting property, which should be easily extrapolated to other properties, at least regionally. My buck-movement data was compared to various weather and other parameters that were downloaded from the National Weather Service and U. S. Naval Observatory web sites.

Throughout the entire rut sequence, weather overall was found to be the single, largest factor affecting buck movement. I was able to isolate and analyze buck movement as it related to rain events — which usually preceded cold fronts — daily low temperature, daily high temperature, daily percentage of cloud cover and average daily wind speed.

Trail cameras were set up along scrape lines after bucks began scraping prior to the onset of the rut.

Morning low temperature 

I compared daily buck movement with the corresponding daily low temperature, as recorded by the National Weather Service, and found that there was actually a prominent sweet spot for overall buck movement. Fully half of all observed buck movement occurred on days when the morning low ranged from 31° to 40°, with 70% of all buck movement corresponding to days with a morning low temperature below 46°. I was quite surprised to find that only 4% of the observed buck movement occurred below 31°. In other words, cool to cold mornings triggered good buck movement, but extreme cold had the opposite effect. I also found that only 5% of daily observed buck movement occurred on days with a low temperature of 61° or higher.

Daily high temperature

The daily high temperature by itself was found overall to not be nearly as useful a predictor of daily buck movement as the daily low temperature.

Percent cloud cover 

Cloud cover, or lack thereof, equates roughly to barometric pressure. A lack of cloud cover is an indicator of a rising barometer or higher barometric pressure, while cloudy conditions indicate a falling or lower barometric pressure. In this study on my property, fully 62% of all observed buck movement occurred when the daily average cloud cover ranged from 0 to 20%. Cold “bluebird” days after frontal passage definitely seemed to favor increased buck movement.

Average daily wind speed

As one might expect, 78% of my observed buck movement occurred when the average daily wind speed did not exceed 10 mph. Slightly less than half of all buck movement was observed when the average wind speed did not exceed 5 mph.

Precipitation

Rainfall events were observed to definitely suppress buck movement, with buck activity coming to an almost complete halt during periods of heavy precipitation.

The author was able to pattern buck movements and how they related to weather conditions by studying more than 300 trail-cam photos.

What did I learn?

  • There was a morning low-temperature sweet spot of 26° to 40°, where fully 66% of buck movement occurred.
  • At 25°and below, buck movement dropped way off.
  • Buck movement vs. high temperature was less defined, but only 4% of observed buck movement occurred with a daily high of 45° or lower.
  • Fully 62% of buck movement occurred with 0 to 20% cloud cover. Bluebird days are best.
  • Only 21% of buck movement occurred on days with average wind speeds of 10 to 15 mph or higher.
  • In conclusion, with time being a precious commodity, I adjusted my hunting habits to be in the field when my chances for seeing bucks were highest. Not everything I learned was necessarily in synch with supposed conventional wisdom, but at the same time, a day in the woods beats a day elsewhere — whether bucks are moving or not.
About Bill Garbo 87 Articles
Bill Garbo is a petroleum engineer and avid whitetail hunter from Madison. He has lived and hunted out west and taken numerous big game species, but hunting big old mature southern whitetail bucks is his favorite pursuit by a country mile.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply