In September 2014, we published our first blog post. Ah, the good old days when getting blog ideas was easy. Almost a decade later, we’re writing about osteophagia and counting squirrels. I’m not really sure what that says about us. I’ll leave that up to you. I am going to resurrect some of that old material. And when I say old, I mean old. In November 2014, a tagged fawn reappeared as a teenager. It was cool to document one of our tagged deer living into her golden years. But a few months later, we got reports of 2 more teenage does tagged in previous studies. And 2 of the 3 were still alive ..read more

Technology doesn’t always work as planned. There is not a person on the planet that hasn’t cursed their phone at some point. Sometimes it’s user error but sometimes it’s not.  Buck 20429 is an example of the semi-failed technology. We captured him on March 10, 2022 and followed him through December 30th for 2,097 locations before he disappeared. The locations in yellow are daytime and black nighttime. What first struck me is the hard northern boundary of locations along what looks to be a drainage. Hard to tell from a satellite image. When you overlay the roads you can see fewer daytime ..read more

———————————————————————————- From the Northern Crew: Greetings from the North. First a Haiku: Spring is on the way Traps are moving, deer don’t care All our cards are down Things have certainly slowed down the past couple of weeks.  As noted above, we’ve been retiring old trapping locations and moving traps to new areas. Deer are still hitting our bait, but only in some areas.  Two of our old Clover traps had broken welds last week so they are out of commission. We were able to catch 4 more deer including 2 buck fawns, one very large adult female, and one very large adult male. Th ..read more

It’s my favorite hunting season and the only one I participate in. That’s right – it’s shed hunting season. While I disdain the attention antlers get while they are on the head of a deer, I thoroughly enjoy the game of hide and seek they play when they fall off.  But some have questioned my guilty pleasure – aren’t shed antlers used by other critters? If so, should they be left on the ground where they belong? I’ll start with the first question. The short answer is yes. Bones, be they femur, rib, or antler, are used by lots of animals if they are available. It’s called osteophagia – fil ..read more

[Comments in brackets are by Jeannine and Duane] ———————————————————————————- From the Northern Crew: Greetings from the North. Last week the Susquehannock crew captured 9 deer (4 in the northern half and 5 in the southern half). This included a recapture of a buck fawn and a recapture of an adult doe originally ear tagged as an adult in 2019. This makes her at least 7 years old.  We were able to collar one adult female and one adult male.  All captured animals seem to be in excellent health. I want to give a shout out to my awesome crew! They have really come a long way in the pas ..read more

[Comments in brackets are by Jeannine and Duane] ———————————————————————————- From the Northern Crew: Greetings from the North. Last week the northern crew caught 7 deer, including two adult females that we collared. We set a couple new traps, and immediately caught a buck fawn in one of them.  The weather turned out good. The big storm missed us, but we ended up getting a few inches later in the week. New snow brought new tracks, including fishers, porcupine, grouse, coyote, and squirrel. On Friday we recovered a collar from a scheduled drop. We are currently maintaining 19 traps, tho ..read more

[Comments in brackets are by Jeannine and Duane] ———————————————————————————- From the Northern Crew: Greetings from the North. Last week the northern crew set 17 traps and all of them have deer activity. One of our cameras doesn’t have cell service, so that trap continues to be a surprise each day. On Friday we caught our first deer, an adult female. She was enormous. We have three collared deer visiting traps, so we will search for other areas to trap that don’t have collared deer. As I write this, deer number 2 is in the trap and there is plenty of darkness left to catch another ..read more

[Comments in brackets are by Jeannine and Duane] ———————————————————————————- From the Northern Crew: Greetings from the North. Last week we finished repairing most of our traps and began scouting and baiting potential trap sites. Bret delivered the trailer, and we made a few modifications so that we could haul more traps. Deer are visiting several bait sites, and I suspect that they are all active by now.  This week’s plan is to set as many traps as possible and pair each one with a cellular camera. Hopefully, we’ll have caught and marked a bunch of deer by the end of the week. -T ..read more

A past-time of my neighbor and I is to collect our game camera cards, pull out a favorite libation, and watch the videos that ensue. We do it on a bi-weekly basis. The purpose of setting up a game camera is to get videos of deer. And, of course, videos of bucks with large antlers are the most exciting. But we get entertained by other critters as well – like doe fighting, coyotes and bobcats strolling through, not to mention possums, foxes, and more. This past fall was a pretty good year for acorns. At some of our cameras in December, we watched more squirrels than deer. There seemed to be mor ..read more

[Comments in brackets are by Jeannine and Duane] ———————————————————————————- From the Northern Crew: Greetings from the North. Last week we continued to repair traps.  Most are ready to go, however we are still without a functional trailer. Emily and Andrew have been troopers, but I can sense the frustration as all three of us know we are well behind the other crews. We’ll keep our chins up and continue to make as much progress as possible. We are determined to get some traps out this week, one way or another! Much of the snow melted away last week, but this weekend brought a fresh cove ..read more