Deer Activity Analysis

Example of two bucks fighting, photographed by my wildlife camera.

This past weekend I spent my Saturday working on a piece of property that I hunt every year. Late September to early October is the best time to plant food plots for whitetail deer. During the off season and during the hunting season I set up wildlife cameras to observe the quality of deer that are on the property and to observe any patterns that the deer follow that may give me an advantage in hunting them. I downloaded all the pictures from my camera this weekend. To most hunters, these pictures are viewed as cool pictures of deer activity, as an engineer I saw this as a chance to perform some analysis to optimize my advantages used to hunt my property. I set up the graph below, (Figure 1) which shows the number of events that occurred at a specific time of the day. I defined an event as there being any deer activity in the food plot. This graph shows that most of the deer activity is occurring at night. It also shows that there is an increase in activity in the afternoon approaching dusk and a spike in activity around midday. These would be the optimal, legal times of the day to hunt. It is important for an engineer to be able to view the natural world and enjoy describing it mathmatically.


Figure 1: Graph showing the relationship between the time of day and deer activity.