Deer sighting survery

[Rackseeker]

We decided to keep up with deer sightings on our club this year. I pulled the sighting cards Friday. These numbers are for Sept 29- Oct 26, archery season.

There were 549 hours logged on stand.
209 deer seen
55 fawns/yearlings
106 does
48 bucks

2.5 hunting hours = 1 deer sighting
11.5 hunting hours= 1 buck sighting

 

[Andy S.]

Good stuff, I love looking at data. What do you all do if you see a "deer" in the thick stuff at a distance, but cannot positively identify it as a buck or a doe? We record it as an "unknown", but just wondering how you all handle this.

Also, are you using fawns and yearlings as one and the same? Reason I ask is a fawn is 0.5 years old, and a yearling is 1.5 years old. Not being a horses rear, just making that distinction for future reference.

 

[travle]

minus the fawns/yearlings and hunting hours to see deer....looks like you have close to a 2:1 doe/buck ratio pretty good

 

[Rackseeker]

Good stuff, I love looking at data. What do you all do if you see a "deer" in the thick stuff at a distance, but cannot positively identify it as a buck or a doe? We record it as an "unknown", but just wondering how you all handle this.

Also, are you using fawns and yearlings as one and the same? Reason I ask is a fawn is 0.5 years old, and a yearling is 1.5 years old. Not being a horses rear, just making that distinction for future reference.

This is the first year for a sighting survey on this club.I kept it simple this year, just to give us a idea on sightings without getting to picky. I figured I would just add the fawn and yearlings into one figure. Alot of the hunters on the club don't like giving up to much info. If I get positive feedback this year I will have it more detailed next year. With 125 members its hard to get everyone on board for anything.

 

[Andy S.]

I totally understand RS, and I feel your pain with a membership of 100+ and trying to get them all headed in one direction. It looks like you are off to a great start with your data collection, best of luck with your endeavor.

 

[Rackseeker]

Thanks

 

[Redfred16]

A few years back we started a log book like that to help us, it stayed in the cabin and everyone had access to read it. Every hunt the hunter put down:

Stand hunted:
Time in:
Time out:
Number of Seen:
Notes:

We all thought it was kind of a pain to do at first, but after a few weeks we really liked it. At our end of season weekend, we read through the notes and had laughs with who saw the least, who saw the most without a kill, ect. I know they are still doing it now.

 

[ROUGH COUNTRY HUNTER]

thats good info to keep up with

 

[BSK]

Great stuff Rackseeker. Those numbers are very "average" for most forested areas. We've been keeping detailed hunter observation data for 25 years on my place, and it is interesting to see the changes over time.

over the last 10 years, our numbers are very close to yours:

Deer observed per hunting hour: 0.397 (2.52 hunting hours per deer seen)

Antlered bucks observed per hunting hour: 0.110 (9.07 hunting hours per buck seen)

Deer seen on 44.9% of hunts
Bucks seen on 23.6% of hunts


But I also want to reinterate Andy S.'s concern about the fawn/yearling category. A "standardized method" of observation data collection exists, and for your data to be meaningful and comparable, all deer seen should be entered into one of four categories:

Adult doe (any female that is not a fawn)
Adult buck (any buck with hardened antlers [all bucks that are not button bucks])
Fawn (any female fawn or button buck)
Unidentified deer (any deer that could not be positively identified as one of the above three categories)

 

[Rackseeker]

Thanks for the suggestions BSK and Andy. Hopefully I will get to tweak and add to the cards next year. Participating in the survey this year is voluntary this year, hope to change that next year.
Anymore suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[BSK]

Rackseeker,

Really, what data to collect should be driven by what information you might want to know. Now I go super-overboard on data collection, but eventually I find some use for all of it.

Some other ideas for interesting data would be:

Average shot distance for each weapon type (would need to collect the weapon type the person was carrying and the distance of at least the first shot taken).

Percent of shooting opportunities that were missed. In essence, how often did a hunter have a deer within weapon range when they didn't successfully make the kill, for any number of reasons (deer was moving too fast, branch was in the way, deer busted them, etc.). I always find that data interesting. To collect that data, you would need to collect the number of deer seen that were in weapon range for each hunt, and how many were legitimately passed, how many were shot at, and how many the hunter would have wanted to kill but couldn't get a shot.

Beyond just getting the hunting hours per buck seen, I also think--from purely a hunter satisfaction standpoint--it is interesting to get the hours hunted per "shooter" buck seen, even though what a shooter is can be different for each hunter, or may change with a hunter's experience level. But that's OK. You just need to collect how many of the bucks the hunter saw on each hunt were bucks they would have wanted to shoot (or actually did shoot at). I find tracking this over the years can provide a great trend line for how often hunters encounter the caliber of buck they are interested in shooting.

Once hunters get more experienced, you can even have them estimate the age of bucks seen. Then you can generate numbers like "hours hunted per 2 1/2+ year-old buck seen" or "Hours hunted per mature buck seen." Those can be VERY interesting numbers and often don't track the hours per any-age buck seen. In addition, buck data collected with buck age can be used to produce hunter observed buck age structure information (what percent of all bucks seen were 1 1/2, 2 1/2, 3 1/2, mature, etc.).

With the data you already collect, you can also calculate hunter observed adult sex ratio and fawn recruitment. Those can be very important pieces of biological information.