BSK
Well-Known Member
What started as just some mild curiosity has led me down a rabbit hole. I'm in so far I'm going to have to publish this to justify how much time I'm spending on it! At least, if hunters think it is interesting. I originally began discussing this in the Trail Camera Forum, but I thought I should move it here to see what all deer hunters think.
Considering the large volume of trail-camera data I have available from my own property, out of curiosity I began to wonder if there was anything I could learn from looking at the times and days when bucks were photographed visiting scrapes that could be useful as a hunter. To make sure I was comparing apples to apples, I limited my data collection to only times bucks were photographed actually interacting with the scrape. Scrapes are usually created in high deer traffic areas, so sometimes bucks are photographed just wandering through. I wanted to eliminate those and only focus on when bucks come to the scrape itself and interact with it.
As of now, the data is only focused on the last two years, for a couple of reasons. First, I've only been collecting trail-camera data in video mode for the last two years. I didn't want to begin working with still image data just yet. In addition, the last two years are a dramatic contrast. 2020 was a very poor acorn year. On the other hand, 2021 was a bumper acorn year. As hunters, we definitely notice differences in our buck sightings based on acorn availability. But would there be any differences between the two years in scraping activity timing because of the difference in acorn production?
So here is some early data. In these "scrape visits by date" graphs, the blue line is the day to day number of scrape visits caught on camera. The thicker red line is a 5-day running mean, which is a statistical process used to smooth out highly variable day to day swings to more accurately display the statistical trend. The orange line is actual buck-doe chases caught on scrape cameras. The 2021 data ends December 17 because I haven't picked up the last data for the year.
Considering the large volume of trail-camera data I have available from my own property, out of curiosity I began to wonder if there was anything I could learn from looking at the times and days when bucks were photographed visiting scrapes that could be useful as a hunter. To make sure I was comparing apples to apples, I limited my data collection to only times bucks were photographed actually interacting with the scrape. Scrapes are usually created in high deer traffic areas, so sometimes bucks are photographed just wandering through. I wanted to eliminate those and only focus on when bucks come to the scrape itself and interact with it.
As of now, the data is only focused on the last two years, for a couple of reasons. First, I've only been collecting trail-camera data in video mode for the last two years. I didn't want to begin working with still image data just yet. In addition, the last two years are a dramatic contrast. 2020 was a very poor acorn year. On the other hand, 2021 was a bumper acorn year. As hunters, we definitely notice differences in our buck sightings based on acorn availability. But would there be any differences between the two years in scraping activity timing because of the difference in acorn production?
So here is some early data. In these "scrape visits by date" graphs, the blue line is the day to day number of scrape visits caught on camera. The thicker red line is a 5-day running mean, which is a statistical process used to smooth out highly variable day to day swings to more accurately display the statistical trend. The orange line is actual buck-doe chases caught on scrape cameras. The 2021 data ends December 17 because I haven't picked up the last data for the year.
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