The 2009 texas deer season began this past saturday and across the state hunters have begun scouting their property in search of signs of trophy bucks. When assessing the potential of your hunting property there are several helpful tools and techniques to help you determine the quality of deer on your land. There are the traditional methods of judging the size of tracks surrounding waterholes, spotlighting game, or analyzing “rubs.” Rubs are vertical scrapes made on trees in a bucks core area. These scrapes are created when a whitetail sheds the velvet off of it’s antlers by scratching it off against a tree. Much can be learned about a buck by evaluating a scrape on a tree, how deep the abrasions are, the length of the scrape, and how large the tree is that the deer chose to use are all ways of judging the size of the buck’s rack. Today we have new modernized ways of scouting our properties that have begun to replace the more traditional, personal field observations. First, every season we conduct a helicopter fly-over survey to count the number of deer on the land as well as judge the quality and size of bucks inhabiting the ranch this year. Along with helicopter surveys a popular new method of scouting is through the use of digital motion cameras. These are self contained digital cameras used to photograph passing wildlife. The cameras use a motion sensor to trigger an attached digital camera to take a photo as an animal moves in front of the camera. SInce the creation of this handy product the concept has grown and become more and more technologically advanced. Today we have motion cameras that use infra-red flash to not spook passing game, as well as cameras that use a cellular network to wirelessly forward wildlife photos to your email account with the gps location of where the photo was taken.
Early Season Scouting
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