Unread postby mheichelbech » Tue Jul 22, 2014 2:11 pm
These are great responses, exactly what I was hoping for! One of the things I was doing last year was trying to relate deer and mature buck sightings back to my maps to see if the movements made sense from a "book" standpoint. The buck movements seem to be much more in line with what one would have predicted based on topography versus doe movements. For example, in one area, the bucks would not move down to the creek bottom before dark. The does always did but they seem to follow more random paths down the hill. Some travelled down the ridge using one path whereas others followed different but parallel paths down (50-100 yards apart). I still have no idea why they choose one path over another. Also, these particular deer groups would exit the woods to what is basically an overgrown field behind houses. Some groups would enter and go in the field at one place, whereas another would go in at another location 100-150 yards away and a 3rd would go in at a 3rd entry point. However, the prime food source was pretty much in one large "garden" a guy had. Some deer went to that, some didn't. I have no idea why some of the deer did not. Maybe they were tired of eating there.
Interested to see if this squares with what others' experience is.
"One of the chief attractions of the life of the wilderness is its rugged and stalwart democracy; there every man stands for what he actually is and can show himself to be." — Theodore Roosevelt, 1893