BSK
Well-Known Member
Been working on this project for awhile, so I thought I would post some of the data.
I started looking at my trail-cam data and wondering how the times of the buck photographs would compare over a 24 hour day, especially during the peak of the hunting season. Hoped I would learn something that would make me a better hunter.
Considering hunting was my focus, I started entering all of the times bucks have been photographed during the peak of our hunting time - November (peak rut month) and December (post-rut month). I classify a buck-on-camera "event" at the time he first shows up on camera. If a buck hangs around for 10 or 20 pictures, it's still classified as just one "event." Each time a buck showed up in front of any camera on the property, the date and time of that event were recorded. Also the camera location and type of set-up were recorded, as well as breaking down the bucks behavior into a few key groupings. So far, I've just analyzed the events by the hours of the day. Each hour's data is represented as the percent of events in that hour compared to the total number of events in that data set. This "normalizes" the data between years, allowing equal comparison, as some years had more events than others.
For this project, a wide variety of camera set-ups were used. The two most common were cameras pointed into food plots and across scrapes. But any feature that concentrates deer movement is included, such as holes and low-spots in fences, terrain and habitat bottlenecks, old log-skidder roadbeds, deer trails, saddles in ridges, secondary point and main ridge junctions, etc.
So with six years of trail-camera data entered, encompassing 1,564 total events for November and December, here's some analyses.
Below is the graph of camera events of just older bucks (those 2 1/2 years old or older). Each vertical bar represents the percent of total camera events that fell within that hour (1:00 PM to 1:59 PM, 2:00 PM to 2:59 PM, etc.) The two vertical black lines on the bar graph depict the approximate times of daylight and dark (in my area, around 6 AM and 5 PM, respectively for those months). Notice how activity at night stays consistently high, and how activity peaks right around first light and dark, but then falls precipitously to the low point of the 1 o'clock PM hour (1:00-1:59 PM). This is the hour with the lowest percentage of older buck events appearing on camera. What I found really interesting is that the hourly peaks really do occur at dawn and dusk, just like the species classification suggested (they are called "diurnally crepuscular," meaning they move in daylight at twilight). I was also surprised by how late into the morning older bucks are moving, with still some solid movement all the way until the end of the 10 AM hour (10:00-10:59 AM). This will vindicate what TheLBLman has been saying for years.
A really odd result I never expected was the low number of buck events in the last hour of darkness before morning daylight (5:00 AM hour). This pattern was very consistent from year to year. I have no idea why this occurs.
I started looking at my trail-cam data and wondering how the times of the buck photographs would compare over a 24 hour day, especially during the peak of the hunting season. Hoped I would learn something that would make me a better hunter.
Considering hunting was my focus, I started entering all of the times bucks have been photographed during the peak of our hunting time - November (peak rut month) and December (post-rut month). I classify a buck-on-camera "event" at the time he first shows up on camera. If a buck hangs around for 10 or 20 pictures, it's still classified as just one "event." Each time a buck showed up in front of any camera on the property, the date and time of that event were recorded. Also the camera location and type of set-up were recorded, as well as breaking down the bucks behavior into a few key groupings. So far, I've just analyzed the events by the hours of the day. Each hour's data is represented as the percent of events in that hour compared to the total number of events in that data set. This "normalizes" the data between years, allowing equal comparison, as some years had more events than others.
For this project, a wide variety of camera set-ups were used. The two most common were cameras pointed into food plots and across scrapes. But any feature that concentrates deer movement is included, such as holes and low-spots in fences, terrain and habitat bottlenecks, old log-skidder roadbeds, deer trails, saddles in ridges, secondary point and main ridge junctions, etc.
So with six years of trail-camera data entered, encompassing 1,564 total events for November and December, here's some analyses.
Below is the graph of camera events of just older bucks (those 2 1/2 years old or older). Each vertical bar represents the percent of total camera events that fell within that hour (1:00 PM to 1:59 PM, 2:00 PM to 2:59 PM, etc.) The two vertical black lines on the bar graph depict the approximate times of daylight and dark (in my area, around 6 AM and 5 PM, respectively for those months). Notice how activity at night stays consistently high, and how activity peaks right around first light and dark, but then falls precipitously to the low point of the 1 o'clock PM hour (1:00-1:59 PM). This is the hour with the lowest percentage of older buck events appearing on camera. What I found really interesting is that the hourly peaks really do occur at dawn and dusk, just like the species classification suggested (they are called "diurnally crepuscular," meaning they move in daylight at twilight). I was also surprised by how late into the morning older bucks are moving, with still some solid movement all the way until the end of the 10 AM hour (10:00-10:59 AM). This will vindicate what TheLBLman has been saying for years.
A really odd result I never expected was the low number of buck events in the last hour of darkness before morning daylight (5:00 AM hour). This pattern was very consistent from year to year. I have no idea why this occurs.Attachments
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