Podcast: Secrets of GPS Collared Bucks with Dr. Bronson Strickland

At this point in deer season, all serious whitetail hunters must answer two important questions: When will that target buck move? And where will he go?

To answer these questions we can use recent and historical camera data, plus traditional timber craft skills and good old hunter intuition. But it also helps to gain insight into the bigger picture. And that’s what Dr.’s GPS collar data is for. Bronson Strickland can’t be beat.

Strickland is co-director of the Mississippi State University Deer Lab and a certified wildlife biologist. Through the Deer Lab, he conducts research that is important for deer science, but also has implications for management and hunting.

As part of that research, he and his team attached GPS collars to 60 different bucks over the course of two years. Those bucks ranged in age from 2 years old to 6 years old, with most being 3, 4 and 5.

I recently interviewed Strickland on the Outdoor living podcast to discuss some of their research highlights, and how you can use their findings to hunt more effectively this fall.

When it comes to avoiding hunting pressure, Bucks have no rules

One of the things Strickland analyzed was how bucks respond to hunting pressure. He hoped to find some hard and fast rules, such as: When pressure increases, older bucks move into swamps or heavy cover.

But that’s not what the data showed.

“Essentially what we learned is that the only pattern with money and the way they respond to pressure is that there is no pattern,” Strickland says.

There was no tendency for bucks to prefer a specific type of habitat or terrain, as each buck acted in a unique way to avoid hunters.

“Every individual dollar decides where it goes when the hunting pressure starts, and it’s every dollar for itself,” Strickland said.

The only pattern was that the buck does indeed change its habits and patterns to avoid hunters.

Money shows up later

Strickland says that while bucks didn’t necessarily become “nocturnal” as hunting pressure increased, they did see bucks arriving later (in the afternoon and evening) in areas where hunters were present.

“We literally saw this consistent decline week after week, month after month, delaying the time the bucks arrived at the food plots where they would be observed by hunters,” Strickland said. “During archery season they arrived maybe 30 minutes to an hour before sunset, and as you got into the last month of the season they arrived essentially at sunset and most of them arrived after sunset.”

This is probably one of the reasons why the first time you hunt a stand is usually your best chance to kill a mature deer from it; there hasn’t been hunting pressure in that area yet, so the deer appear there during the day.

Bucks pattern us

When hunters don’t see a target buck from the stands or in trail camera photos, they often assume it’s gone. But Strickland’s GPS data showed bucks are still sticking to a core area even as hunting pressure increases. They simply go to the places where we do not disturb or contaminate with human odors.

“Just as we shape a dollar, those dollars shape our pattern,” Strickland says. “If we perform the same ritual weekend after weekend, deer will find out. They know where we are and where we hunt and they avoid those areas.”

Bucks have predictable movement patterns from year to year

Strickland observed two different types of “personalities” when it came to annual movement patterns. The first was a domestic pattern, and these bucks did not drastically change their habitat from summer to fall. The second was a mobile personality, where the goat’s summer house offering did not even overlap with the autumn/winter range. About 33 percent of people in the study had this type of mobile personality, and their movement patterns remained consistent year after year.

In other words, if you saw a buck arrive in a certain area during a specific time last fall (and you know he’s still alive this season), there’s a good chance he’ll show up in the same general area again this year. On the other hand, if you saw a summer buck disappear after shedding its velvet coat last year, it will likely disappear from the property again this fall.

For the domestic-type deer, “They’ll be around,” says Strickland. However, within their core range, they can change their patterns and movements to avoid your hunting pressure.

Bucks can have many roosts

In much of the South and Southeast, it is very difficult to pinpoint the roosting area of ​​a single buck. That’s because Bucks have different sleeping areas, and they will typically sleep in different places in those areas.

“[In the Southeast] We just see bucks using so many different beds throughout the year and it’s very difficult in our landscape to think of a particular buck as being ’embedded here’.”

That makes it difficult to accurately guess where a particular buck may be on any given day, but it also creates a great opportunity for private land managers to create prime roosting sites on their properties. If you have a high degree of confidence about where a mature buck is located, hunting him becomes a lot easier.

Learn more about how to create excellent ground cover and hunt that cover here.

Bucks still hit food plots during the rut, but not to eat

As part of their research, Strickland and his team analyzed how often bucks visited food plots during the rut, and how long they stayed in those plots. They found that rutting bucks entered food plots to check for heat, not to feed.

“Buck visits to food plots increase during the rut, but what’s interesting to me is that the intention is not to eat,” says Strickland.

For hunters, this means changing your strategy around food plots during the rut. Rather than hunting in the center of a plot or in a corner of it, it may be more effective to hunt a main trail that is downwind of the food plot.

Then switch back to hunting the food plot itself in late season as the bucks are trying to replace lost weight at that time.

Read next: What do deer eat?

Final thoughts on Buck movement

If you haven’t been able to make good money this season, don’t be afraid to change things up. Set up trail cameras and tree stands in new locations, hunt at different times and target new types of cover. Do everything you can to break your traditional routine, because chances are the money in your environment has given you a pattern.

“Unless you know the buck has died…he will most likely come back [this fall] and you have to start thinking, ‘If I screwed up last year with the way I hunted him, what can I do this year that’s going to be a little different,'” Strickland says.