Did some poking around lately and felt the Florida guys could use some photo examples of deer beds.


These beds can be spotted from a good distance as well as on satellite. In Florida, and most of the southeast where palmetto is found, the habitat is a fire dependent system and most of our public lands that allow hunting are managed using prescribed fire. These fires leave "fire shadows" that can be seen via satellite imagery. They occur along one side, or several sides, along the edges where palmetto meets a depression pond or a cypress head. In these areas, over several years, palmetto will get very tall and create perfect bedding areas along the outer edges of the cypress heads. It has been my experience that does will bed on tussocks within the cypress while the bucks bed in the thick palmetto waiting for and scent checking the does not very far off.
In the photo below you can see a good example of a fire shadow, within which you can quickly spot where the bed will be.... directly under the highest point of the palmetto patch:




In these beds, it is amazing how much cooler it is as soon as you step inside.
Here is an example of the edge that I'm talking about along with an example of where you can expect the beds to be

and another example (see if you can spot the bed)

Here's an example of a bed that has lots of available browse: palmetto berries, blue berries, gall berries, small fern shoots, etc.

BUT...... here's an example of what's not a buck bed.... or deer bed for that matter.....

These guys will move in on buck beds and create their own beds. I hate it when I find these guys around good buck bedding areas. They can be better at winding you, there's generally many of them (so more eyes), and they will eventually push the bucks out of an areas due to their aggressiveness.
Wild Hogs....
see tracks below, as well as the obvious dug out bowl above

I had another great photo of a bedding area that I must have removed from my phone, but it was my first bedding area that I had ever found.... it had fantastic trails going to and from a cattail marsh, it was on a nice high mound with lots of palmetto covering it out of site.... but it had this odd vomit/scat in it... I will get another photo of it (and hopefully it's inhabitant) to show y'all before I reveal what it was. Hopefully the awesomeness of the spot will come through in the photos.
Hopefully some of the other info above helps someone build a search image.