Value and Limitations of Thermal Drone Deer Surveys

Thermal drones are all the rage, but they are not a silver bullet and have serious limitations when used to develop deer population estimates. Bronson, Bonner, and Moriah discuss the strengths and weaknesses of thermal drone surveys and how Wildlife Investments uses this new technology alongside long-term datasets to fine tune deer population management.

Transcript

Wild Turkey Management Academy Announcement

Moriah Boggess 0:00

Hey, real quick, before we start the podcast, we hope to see you at our second Wild Turkey Management Academy that we're holding February 28th, 2026, in Ufala, Alabama. The course is going to be taught by Drs. Marcus Lashley and Dr. Will Goldsby. It's a one-day classroom course. It's going to cover everything from the basics of wild turkey biology, how to make management decisions, managing different cover types for turkeys. Marcus and Will are even going to get down in the weeds, laying out different properties, walking through different scenarios that they've encountered so that you can apply those to properties you manage. Go to wildlifeinvestments.com, click on our education events page. You'll see all the information you need to sign up. We hope to see you the end of February and you follow. Welcome to Wildlife Investments, where we discuss wildlife research, habitat, hunting, and land management with our panel of leading resource managers. Wildlife Investments. So everywhere you look, there's drone surveys being done. We're doing them on properties we manage. They're an awesome tool. There's probably a little bit too much salesmanship behind the technology, but they are good. And I have not seen a lot of information being put out there by scientists. And in this lag time of science kind of catching up to it, the industry has taken off and everyone's advertising deer herd analysis for whatever that means. Deer herd analysis. And that's supposed to give you some kind of a tangible product that is supposed to be the answer to all your deer management needs. And so today we're tackling this, and you can tell it's already a little bit of a spirited topic. We use drones all the time. We're doing these kind of surveys on our properties, but there's a lot of information being overstated about what you can learn about deer populations using drones. And so we're going to tackle that today. Me, Mariah Boggess, Bonner Powell, and Bronson Strickland, we're all going to discuss drones real quick. You'll get all of our take on drones and how we feel about them, how we're using them, where we think the technology can really help, and where we think its values being overstated. So where I would like to start the conversation is around quote unquote herd analyses, which I think is just a fancy word that doesn't mean much. But to be fair, I mean we were, you know, we do analyses all the time, but generally analyses, you're just looking at trends and data, and one snapshot count of how many deer are on your 150 acres is hardly an analysis. It is at best at best a census, but I want us to discuss that as well. How this is not a census, and I guess we should probably back up and even start it. That term and what we mean by census versus a survey versus what we probably more call you'll broadly call a survey just some one form of an index. It's relative to the population whole, but it's not the population whole. So for me, if I have any kind of an axe to grind with the drone survey community, there's a lot of good guys out there doing it, and we we hire some ourselves, and we have a drone, we do the work ourselves. I'm not trying to bash the technology for the people doing it, but to put some cyborgs on it. When you fly a drone just kind of willy-nilly over a property and count deer, I I've got two questions for it for the people that are doing that. And again, we're doing this, but what does that actually tell you? If you have 15 deer on your 100 acres, what does that mean to you? What I mean, seriously, what does that mean? And then two, do you really only have that many deer on your property? Probably not, because the the research hasn't really been done to quantify how to calculate the number of deer missed. And I know I've I've talked to a lot of drone operators that are like, oh yeah, we you know, we got every single one of them. It's a hundred. I have joked about that. I know it's like there's a false sense of confidence there. And like I did a survey last week or the week before, I forget now, it was a really good condition day. And flying that thing, you feel invincible because you're picking out deer left and right, and it feels like you get every single deer. But I can tell you, every time we got down in a little bottom, this was a nice cold day, it was kind of drizzly, high of like 45 degrees. Everything was popping out, there were no sunspots or anything. But anytime you got near a bottom with water, you start to get little warm spots because you have standing pooled water, and you get that with stump holes, you get that with fire ant mounds, you get that with rocks, you get it with all sorts of different things, even when there isn't sunspots. And to think that we're getting every single deer is a false assumption, in my opinion, but also it's not necessary. If if we just look at drone surveys like some like any other form of a population index, it can be very valuable. I guess where I have a problem, and I'm gonna shut up now and let you guys talk, but where I have a problem is is the over salesmanship of drone surveys is the end-all be all that tells you exactly how many deer you have. And you see all this advertising of you know all these fancy words thrown out there of just someone flying a drone and counting deer, which is awesome, and we use it, but it it doesn't, you know, it's it's it's not all that. It's just another tool in the toolbox.

Bonner Powell 5:42

Yeah, and and the perception of that with landowners thinking that it is you know a census, the perception of that hurts us a little bit. Like I always go back to Bronson's story about what was it, Bronson? We you flew that property and you're like, we saw three rabbits, and they started pan, they were like, we only have three rabbits? Yeah. You know, like, no, that's just what we saw. You know, we weren't even really looking for rabbits, but everybody just assumes that it's a s it's a complete count, it's everything on the property. You know, and sometimes you may get close, but I I think uh yeah, I think the advertising sets that perception, and and we have a problem with that a lot of times when we talk with uh landowners.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 6:26

Yeah. And Mariah, I think you used this term a moment ago. It's a it's a snapshot. And a snapshot better than no shot is it's better than nothing. You know, it gives you that one window, that one glimpse at that one time during you know that that day and that time of day of what the the the herd is and some estimate of density. But I guess think of it this way is when you're managing a population, I don't want just a snapshot. I I want a movie. Uh you know, I want five snapshots. I ideally I want 20 snapshots. And the smaller the property is, the more snapshots I would want because of the movement of deer on and off the property. So we can create these scenarios depending on the time of day and depending on the distribution of cover and food to where you might see very few deer or you might see a lot of deer, and that was just based on when you flew. And so then we got to move into what is the product that a lot of people want with a survey. They want the photographs, they want to be able to have the drone operator identify bucks and zoom in and get the photo, how many eight-pointers, nine-pointers, ten-pointers, etc. And all that's good and provides information. What I would rather have is a very reliable count of the number of deer on the property and and where they're at, and then use other tools that where we could get buck age structure and buck inventory and and things like that. So, I mean, if I were to sit back and and you know, we're doing this as well, so we're not sitting here looking down our nose at the the service that people provide and the information you get because we're utilizing it too. But when we're managing a property, we're also seeing opportunities and deficiencies of just doing one drone survey during a particular time of the day. And so that that's why we like to combine it with other information so we can maximize the information we're getting. And then you get into the situation of, all right, what is it really telling you? I've got 89 deer on my property. Is that is that good? Is that bad? Well, that it depends. You know, so now it depends on herd condition and what what is the the the deer body at the skinning shed telling you? What are habitat conditions? So it is a it is a uh very interesting and cool way to do a survey or a snapshot, but it doesn't tell you everything. You got to combine it with other information.

Snapshot vs Long-Term Deer Population Data

Bonner Powell 9:14

Yeah, it it basically ends up being just like everything else. It's a tool in the toolbox, it's not the end-all be-all. And and kind of while we're talking about shortcomings of the of the drones, you know, like I say, we're not trying to trash them too bad. But while we're talking about the shortcomings of the drone, one thing that I've noticed, and I know Mariah's noticed this as well, is that the overhead pictures of bucks are basically useless for age. Like I, you know, I can't tell up from down on those overhead pictures of bucks. And the the bad thing is, is that's what is taking these pilots so long to run the survey, is like every we stop at every deer, we zoom in. Oh, doe, oh, it's a buck, but the limbs are in front of his antlers. I gotta back out, go around 90 degrees, see if I can get a better picture. And one thing that Mariah and I have noticed is that like your efficiency is is probably at least doubled or tripled when you're just flying the survey and counting the number of blips, and and let's use trail cameras to get pictures of bucks and that we can actually age with some kind of certainty as opposed to getting a picture of them over their back. But, you know, the pictures are cool, but it doesn't doesn't tell us a whole lot. Yeah. That that's one of my biggest I think for me that's the biggest shortcoming of the drone surveys, because we have people send us pictures like, hey, I got this from a drone survey. What can you tell tell about him? Nothing. I mean I can tell he's an eight point, but that's about it.

Can You Age or Size Bucks from Drone Imagery?

Benefits and Insights from Drone Usage

Moriah Boggess 10:57

Yeah. So even pr so back to your point about aging, even on properties where you know there's smaller properties and there's only so many unique bucks, and we have a lot of trail cameras to parse out those unique bucks and kind of classify them. I've looked at drone survey video from from flights we've done and trying to uniquely identify those bucks and match them up with what we have on trail cameras, it's possible, but it's tough. And when you're dealing with 110-inch eight-pointers, you know, just the flood of the classic little eight-point, it's near impossible. It's already hard enough on a on a trail camera survey, but that really highlights the difficulty of that overhead look. It's even tougher assessing the size of a buck. I mean, I was looking at one the other day that a buck that we have from summer trail camera photos and fall trail camera photos, and we caught him on this thermal survey in daylight, and I had daylight video of the buck. I mean, I was the one flying it looking at him, took photos of them, got them from different angles. And in the the drone photos, he looks 20 inches smaller. Like he looks like a basket rack eight point, but it's not a bad four-year-old buck. I mean, he's he's right around 130-inch eight-point. And the only reason I know it's that deer is from some unique spacing. His G3, he's got like a crab thaw, crab claw G3 on the one side, and then a more typical frame on the other side. And so when it's that hard to uniquely identify a buck, I mean, how are you going to one, like you're saying, age that deer? Impossible. It's already hard enough to do with trail camera photos. Age your deer and then somehow make an assessment based on size and age for harvest? Absolutely not. I mean, this is something we've we've talked about because like we would love to be able to do that. That would really streamline the the processes that we go through to tell landowners, hey, shoot this deer, don't shoot that one, all that. Because we want to incorporate and use drones more and more for being able to you know have another index of a population trajectory and whether or not it's changing over time. And if we could pull that from it, that would streamline our process. But it's just not good data for that purpose. I'm not going to name the drone company. I I've seen a bunch of different drone companies advertising these same similar deliverables, but I'm looking at advertisement right now, and a few of the things that they're advertising is yeah, aging on the hoof, habitat recommendations, a total count of all the deer on the property, and then even harvest recommendations like you need to shoot X number of deer and stuff, all from a drone survey. Now, can you make some recommendations on some of those things from a drone survey? Partly. But only with other data. You know, like we can make some recommendations on on habitat, but only when we've looked at habitat on the ground. Because are you gonna tell me that you can fly with a drone burn or not? That's what I was gonna say. That one right there is a little crazy. If you think you could do that, you don't know a thing about plants. That's yeah, that's my gripe, you know. Yeah, for sure.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 14:14

Well, let's talk about we kind of talked about some shortcomings and some way you can have some misdirection from it. Let's talk about a positive that that I I think is is really beneficial would be a scenario where maybe it's uh a landowner you're just starting to work with, or maybe Bonner Mariah, you're reading the habitat, and you can tell, man, they they got a lot of deer on this property. They need to engage in a pretty heavy dough harvest and maybe some buck removal, etc. And you throw this number out there, whatever it is. And of course this scales of property size, but you say, You need to harvest 50 dough. And they come back to you and go, fifty dough? We don't have fifty doughs on the property. We're not seeing them this year. Even if we, you know, really, really try, there's no way the one thing this type of you know technology will provide you is to go up in the air and go, not only do you have fifty doughs, we we estimate you have a hundred and fifty dough. Yeah. So it's not gonna be a problem. And then you start peeling the layers of the onion and you go, uh, you're not seeing them. Why? Well, you're not hunting correctly. Or like this year, yep, but we have a heavy mast crop, so they're not on the food plot. So the observability during daylight hours, but you know, from looking at the habitat, you know from the body condition at the skin and shed that there's a density problem. And you need to take, you need to remove some mouths from that landscape. This would give you a way where I think a lot of clients or people will go, I believe you now, because I'm showing you the video or the map that you've made of these are all the deer, that is always even going to be an an underestimate, typically, because deer you missed or deer that may reside on your property that are off the property. So I don't know, it it does add a a layer of confidence to convince people about our harvest recommendations.

Moriah Boggess 16:21

Yeah. I think it can work both ways too.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 16:26

Yeah, I agree with that.

Moriah Boggess 16:27

Especially with a small property because deer are moving on and off. So as long as you kind of go into that with the take it with a grain of salt mindset, I I think it can be important. Now, now I want to circle back to something we we touched on earlier, which is the snapshot idea of a drone survey. And any kind of good survey design, and you learn this in wildlife techniques, but any kind of good survey design has a few attributes, and I'm not going to go through all the different things, you know, all the different ways that you can mess up a survey, but at bottom, bottom line, it needs to be random. You you need to try, and so by randomizing a survey, like if let's say we're apply this to human dimensions, like we're doing a survey of hunters to say, you know, do you do you want to be able to shoot 10 bucks versus four? You would you wouldn't select the group of hunters from a deer hunting page on Facebook. You would select it from the whole of all licensed hunters, and then you would randomly assign numbers to hunters across that population and then survey hunters from that random selection. You would try to remove the chance that you are biasing your sample, you know, from a from a subgroup that might be slanted one way or the other. So you wouldn't want to select that from a group of you know the the QDM hunter Facebook group for that state on Facebook, because they're gonna say, hey, I only want to shoot one deer, or you know, you're gonna bias your sample. And so we want truly random, and then we want repeated in in the case of looking at a population, we want it to be repeated. The more times you repeat that survey, the better chance it becomes random. And so, you know, I use a use a for instance here, but if we think about a property that is the only bottom one hardwoods, maybe you have a river corridor and it's the only bottom one hardwoods around, and you have a lot of ag adjacent, and you only do your thermal survey in January every year, you're going to more than likely overcount your deer every single time and think that you have more deer than you do because your property is probably pulling in deer because of food resources in winter and also just the limitation of cover on the landscape. But if we could repeat that, and this is where we run into flaws with relying solely on drones, is that we can't really lengthen out that survey window into summer when we might want to. We have to rely on other means or get creative with our survey technique because when we're dealing with hardwoods, we we we can't see down into that, you know, through that canopy quite as well. And that's where I don't have a problem with surveying that population one snapshot with a drone in January every year, as long as I have other data like camera data or observation data from hunters on the stand to then pair that with so that if I start to see some crazy number with the drone, I'm not freaking out because of just that drone number. I've got some other data to compare it with. And I actually, I mean, we have recently had some properties where the drone numbers are wildly different from the camera numbers, and that would suggest that there's something going on there on the ground that's making deer shift onto or away from that property before and after that drone period, that survey period.

Bonner Powell 19:45

Yeah, and I think hunter observation is a great, great tool to pair it with. But again, you know, if we're looking at the limitations of everything across the year, the hunter observation data is a lot of it. If you look at if you look at hunter observation data for properties, you know, you're gonna have a little bit of data from your bow hunters, unless it's a die hard, you know, bow hunting club or a or a owner that's a diehard bow hunter. You're gonna get a little bit of observation data there early in the season, and then you're gonna get the bulk of your observation data, obviously during, you know, depending on where you're at, probably when the when the rut is supposed to be. But you know, typically in the southeast, you're gonna get most of your data in like the second half of December and all of January. And again, that kind of overlaps with the time that we're flying the drone. So sometimes it's hard to separate those two. And again, I really like hunter observation data, but to your point, Mariah, I think the the summertime surveys really help fill a gap when we don't have I mean, there that's a tool there that fills the gap and we don't really have another option. You know, obviously the drones in hardwoods don't work. Uh the drones in thick, thick pines don't work, like young pines or unthinned pines don't work good there. So if your property consists of a lot of that, you know, during the summertime, especially, you you basically got to go back and use some kind of camera survey, get on the ground, and get pictures of deer. That's at least my opinion.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 21:19

You're also gonna get a lot of good video or photos of bucks that will not be on your property during hunting season. So if you're during the summertime, you're gonna get all these wonderful bachelor groups and they're gonna be in velvet and they're gonna look bigger as well. But I don't know exactly what the number is because it would depend on property size, but yeah, up to half of them are gonna be a mile away or two miles away come hunting season. So you you just you really need to repeat the process over and over. And the more you repeat it, and like Mariah, you said, you know, statistically and with study design, it's randomization and replication. R and R. That is what makes a good study and statistically robust, and that is what needs to be incorporated in this type of setup to give you greater and greater confidence. Yeah.

Observability Research and What Drones Miss

Using Drone Surveys as a Population Index

Moriah Boggess 22:13

So on that, in a perfect world, yeah, we have replication and randomization. You know, when we have a I'm gonna go back to a like 150-acre property where we can really only just count the deer that are on that property. We know there's some bias, and we can only do it in winter, back to that imperfect scenario we're always dealing with. And then compound on that bonner, you mentioned the observability, and we we know that it is not perfect. In fact, when we started dipping our toes in all the drone stuff, you know, before, like there wasn't any, and there really isn't any published literature out there quantifying that. And then also, you know, first you'd have to quantify it, but then you would have to create some variables so that you could apply that onto different properties and say, hey, you know, in general, this these cover types and these kind of conditions have this level of observability, and that would change over, you know, you think about the life of a pine stand from one year to 30 years, and then there's all these different, you know, management interventions, whether it's thinning, like pre-commercial thinning, mid-story removal, all these different things could likely affect observability. So we I did want to just throw this in there. We have done, we're not just talking out of our butts completely. We have done some research on this in-house looking at observability, and these, you know, even our numbers here are just snapshots. They are kind of one-offs where we went in with people, randomly distributed in these stands, flew over them with the drone, had the drone pilot pick out those people, and then we went back and looked and saw how many we missed. And and we confirmed, yeah, anywhere from 50 in our stands, it was anywhere from 50 to 100% observability, with dense cedars being the worst, dense pines being very bad, and then like an open early successional field or low basal area pines being the best. In those types of areas, yeah, in our replications, we were getting about 100% of those people. But for me to have a lot of confidence in even our numbers, we would need to replicate those more and more and more across different study sites. And then the the problem also comes back to it's like, okay, well, you can't you can't feasibly do that on every single property and in every single condition, calculate your observability. There's always going to be some error even in your estimation of observability. But at the end of the day, none of this is really a problem if we just look at drone surveys as an index. So, an example of an index, I mean, you could do a you could do a spotlight survey on your property with the right permits. You can do a spotlight survey, and it's not going to tell you exactly how many deer you have on your property. It will give you an estimate. But when you do that spotlight survey year after year after year after year at the same time, hopefully you do a couple replicates each season when you do it, but you do it at the same time in the same way, then you will see trends. Those numbers are not perfect. It might say you have 101 deer. You probably don't have a one hundred and one deer. But over time, if that starts to climb up to consistently increasing to 140 deer, well, that's a pretty good indication that at least during that time of year, your population is increasing. And that's how we use these indices to monitor a population over time because we don't really need to know the exact number of deer. We'll talk about that on another episode. But if we know observability isn't perfect with drones, it's not a true census because a true census is when you count every single animal. So the idea that we're we're doing an analysis that counts all the deer is wrong. It's not a census, but it is a snapshot of an index. And as long as we're looking at it that way, and that's I mean, that's how we're using it now at wildlife investments, is we are we're putting drones in the air, we're doing these surveys, and then we're replicating them year after year at the same time, and then looking at that trend in comparison with the other other data that we're collecting from hunters, from you know, at the skinning shed, from trail cameras, putting it all together to paint that picture. And so it's just another layer of data. And also in a time of year, one nice thing is that it's kind of in late, a lot of times it's late after season. It's a time of year when we're not getting a lot of data. Most people are kind of burnt out. There, there's not a lot of hunting happening that time of year. If it's even still season, cameras are down, that sort of thing. And so it's it is nice to kind of have a shoulder season where we can get another data point to consider when we think about harvest the next year.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 26:51

Yeah, I think it's very akin to observation data. No one, I mean, you could construct it to where you could come up with a population estimate from observation data, but nobody uses that. They use observation data if it's collected the same way year after year, to detect a trend. We are seeing more or we're seeing less, and that's giving you insight into the population is stable, increasing or decreasing. And and I think that the drone survey, if replicated, can can do that same thing. Another aspect, heck, this may be my favorite aspect of it, and we always have to qualify this with it can't be a snapshot, this has to be repeated, number of days, time of day, etc. Is I think it's really cool to be able to look for voids on your property and demonstrating to a landowner that we would see, we would have insight in that based on the density of the trees or the canopy or the pasture, whatever. We can say, hey, this five, ten, fifty, hundred, whatever acres of your property is not doing anything for deer. And if you don't believe me, we've put the drone over this a number of times. There's never a deer here. Then now you've got two paths you can go down. Do we want to make that patch better for cover, for food, whatever? Or might we use that from an access perspective? Is hey, no deer here. We know why, habitat-wise, deer are not here. Might that be a way where someone can access a particular area and not disturb deer? You know, when we're on properties, we see this all the time where you got some really good bedding cover here. We can demonstrate it, like Mariah most recently where you went, you you were just seeing where all the deer were. If you got a road going in between that, then the deer are gonna know when you're on the property and when you're hunting, etc. So we need to tease those apart, move them apart in uh how we're accessing the property. So it's we have to look at it like that as well do you want to maximize every quarter acre of your property to be food and cover? Maybe not. We might want areas of the property where we do not expect deer to be, but we use that how we navigate the property during hunting season so that we increase the huntability of the deer, keeping deer on your property, making them observable during daylight hours, etc.

Identifying Habitat Voids and Deer Use Patterns

Moriah Boggess 29:40

Yeah. It's definitely really cool to see that that snapshot of where deer are in the moment. I've had a couple different observations. My the first one is every time I fly a drone there or or see someone fly one, there's fewer deer in in a stand than I would like to imagine in in my hunter hunting boots. In other words, I always think I'm like, well, if I were in that stand, I wouldn't be seeing crap. You know, there's nothing around, you know. And I always think how I would never want to connect the drone to hunting, not only because of the the illegality of it, but how I mean how little fun would that be if you were in the stand and you could actually know how few deer are around you? Because oftentimes that distribution is not random. It it is concentrated in areas. And that anecdote you were you were referring to, Bronson, the other day. I mean, whenever it got mid-morning and deer started bedding down, it was like nine to one deer out in our old fields bedded or in heavily thin ponds with a very similar plant community bedded. They weren't in the hardwoods. And not that you you you could probably hunt those hardwoods right now, and if you found a hot tree that the deer were still on and that they would you know show up there eventually. But at least that day in those conditions, they were in those thin ponds. And so you could see where if you were hunting those thin ponds that morning, you would be like, Man, they it was an awesome hunt. But you could be 300 yards away in the hardwoods, and and maybe you didn't see any deer. And I know like that's kind of basic hunting. Like we know deer are concentrated and they kind of move around, they switch resources throughout the season. It's just so cool with the drone to actually see that. And that's one thing I've really enjoyed.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 31:25

No doubt about it. That's what's cool about it. Is I don't know, it just adds a you know, it's all a different context. You know, the trail camera gives you the information, you get really good photographs of the deer, but you are limited to that point in space. The deer has got to come to you, and you you get this good image of it. The the cool thing about the drone is getting this better spatial context of where deer are at, where they're spending time. And again, we just have to say this over and over. It it can't just be a snapshot. It's got to be repeated over and over again, but you will absolutely see spatial trends doing that. I wonder, Mariah, if it was relatively cold that day, like you just mentioned the the temperature. Did sunlight have anything to do? Were deer wanting to bed in an area where if the sun had been out, I think you said it was also cloudy or overcast, but I wonder if that had anything to do where they were choosing to bed.

Moriah Boggess 32:28

Man, if I could get it in the head of a deer, I'd be rich. Yeah, no, there was no sun out that day. Which was kind of a stumper for me. I I actually would have guessed that the deer would have been in some of the the thicker pines. If if there were ever a day to for deer to be in the thicker pines, I would have thought it would have been then. But yeah, they were out in the the most open pines. There was really no direct sunlight at all. It was very cloudy, kind of drizzly off and on all day, and they were bedded in these very open stands. It'd be it would have been interesting to be able to fly that property on some different conditions to see if that changes. Maybe that's just where the deer prefer to bed on that property right now. But yeah, the other thing that could have been going on there too, that you know, we would have had to go and actually measure. But underneath some of those other understories, I I don't know what it was, if it was like a temperature inversion or if there was much mixing happening. But if there were some cool areas underneath those canopies where the cool air was kind of pooled, there's a chance that maybe they were out in those more open areas just because there was more warm air, even though it wasn't direct sunlight, just kind of mixing into the into those canopies and getting moved through. That would be another hypothesis I would throw out there, but right now it's kind of all guesswork. The cool takeaway for me there was just to see, you know, obviously we see deer in those those types of plant communities all the time feeding, but it was a really cool anecdote for that landowner to see, hey, here's deer. Not only you know do you see them out there when you're hunting in their in these heavily thinned stands in the old field, but here they are seeking them out specifically for cover. Because those deer weren't they weren't eating, they were all bedded down or or bucks cruising through those bedding areas. And so that's just another point for that type of habitat management, providing some diversity in cover, not only just food cover.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 34:24

Okay. So how about this? So Mariah, if you had that exact same scenario, let's not talk about underneath the open pines, let's talk about Oldfield. Doing that, you're providing a structure that will serve as cover, depending on the age of, you know, in your management time since fire, whatever. And compare it to an adjacent stand of switchgrass. Those would be providing very similar structures for bedding. But then I wonder, and you know, we assume that the old field is going to be a lot more attractive because it is also providing food as well. Does that help you or hurt you from a hunting perspective? The question being the concentration of deer. Will deer be are they attracted if you had them side by side? And from the cover perspective, they are very similar. But they are attracted to the old field because it is providing the cover and it is also providing food. So when they say, for example, get up for the afternoon-evening movement bout, it's gonna take them longer to exit that area, versus, say, a switchgrass scenario, they're there, but there is no food to be found there. So they gotta get up and leave and go to a food plot or find an oak tree or whatever, and you observe them.

Old Fields vs Switchgrass for Deer Habitat

Moriah Boggess 35:56

I have two thoughts, and then I I want to toss it over to Bonner for his input on this, but I don't I have jumped deer out of switchgrass. I'm not saying deer don't bed in switchgrass, but it's really crappy cover when you think about it. I mean, it would be like asking deer to bed in a bamboo thicket or a cattail marsh. Do deer do it? Yes. But when deer are in a cattail marsh, in my experience, they're almost always on a little high spot where there is a change in cover. And I think that's what these old fields, when managed right, especially when you have a little bit longer disturbance, you know, return. It's not like I'm not talking about, you know, a brooding plot that we're discing every year. That's really not providing bedding cover. But if if we have an old field or a really herbaceous understory that we're we're burning it every three years, you know, we're getting some pockets of cover in there. And to me, that is way better cover than a monoculture of super dense switchgrass because you have openings where deer have a little bit of a visibility next to really thicker cover. And that might be a little pocket of sumac, that might be some brambles that you know, it can vary. And the nice thing about it is with fire, you get some of that heterogeneity without trying. We don't have to go in there and plant. Yeah, we're not in there, you know, discing around little sumac monts or anything. Like we can burn right through it and it'll re-sprout. And so I would counter first just with saying, in my opinion, I think the old field is providing better cover flat out. So I think deer would select to be in that over switchgrass. Now, your other question is interesting because there definitely people do use switchgrass as a way of kind of creating a deer desert. And they use it because they think that deer bed in it and then have to get out quickly. Maybe. Or maybe deer are just moving through it to get to get out of that crap as quick as possible. We're also talking about switchgrass in the deep south versus in the Midwest. And if I were, you know, on a on a property in the Midwest talking about this, I would be approaching this question differently. So I want to throw that out there. Really talking about this in the context of the the deep south. But I think if we had any size stand of switchgrass on those properties where we have nice, well-developed old fields, we could, this is a guess, but we could probably survey them over and over and over again. And I doubt we would see any deer betting in those. On the average, I think they would be, if they're using that type of early succession, I think they're going to be in the old fields where there's a more diverse plant community and therefore structure. I think there might be times deer might get driven into that old or into that switchgrass if the old field is getting overhunted and that type of thing. Um, like if they just flat out are, you know, scared under a rock because the hunting pressure is so high, maybe they get pushed into that. But from a from a like from a habitat standpoint, it provides very little, very little of the components we want. It doesn't provide food, but then it also is just so dense. I mean, think if you're a deer in there, you're a you're a a sitting, you're just you're a sitting duck.

Visibility, Predator Avoidance, and Bedding Strategy

Bonner Powell 39:04

The visibility for me is a big thing, Mariah, because I know we attribute, you know, deer have a great sense of smell, deer have, you know, they can hear very well, but visibility is a big deal. And if you look at most old fields and pine stands in the southeast, if a deer stands up, you know, at least their head is usually above the vegetation. You know, a lot of times in old fields, you know, where we have poor soil, it'll be mid-shoulder or or whatever it is, top of the back. But most of the time when deer stand up and stands like that, they can see where something is coming from, what it is that's coming from that direction, and where I can go to get away from that. And you counter that with the structure of the switchgrass, which is, you know, normally I a lot of times switchgrass is advertised as four to eight feet tall. I've never seen it less than six or seven feet. Like it just it, you know, it does really well. But I mean that if I stand up in it, yeah, in Mississippi, if I stand up, I can't see, you know, what's coming or where I need to go or or whatever ever. I think the visibility ends up being a a pretty big deal for deer, not to mention the other things that Mariah's already said.

Moriah Boggess 40:21

You know, the other thing too, all the people that talk about buck bedding, and you know, there's this big focus in hunting media on finding just deer bedding areas. They they call them buck bedding areas. Maybe those are areas where deer are or bucks are more likely to be than others just based on sign. But regardless, I mean I I pay a lot of attention to that when I'm hunting. I I don't see deer bedding in places where they don't have some kind of a visual advantage. To your point. Yes, they're using smell, but they they I don't see deer going into the middle of you know something that's so dog hair thick. And I'm making comparisons with like river cane thickets. I see deer bed in river cane almost every time they're right on the edge, and they're probably sitting in a spot where they can hear and smell anything coming through the river cane, and then they can see. You see this like out in the sand hills and longleaf ponds, they can see out into the that young, younger vegetation that's been more recently burned and disturbed, but they're at on the edge of something really thick. And so in the case of a switchgrass, I think that's probably where deer would find the most value is on the edge. And so you do have that component, but to plant acres and acres where you have the center that's just a desert seems so pointless to me. And I know we're getting tangential here, but like it just I think it is a symptom of everyone wanting to rely, you know, over-rely on planting. Like habitat has to come in a bag, like that's just the human mindset, right? You gotta feed the deer, you gotta, you gotta plant something. And I think the over-reliance on switchgrass is a is a is a that compounded with it is difficult to develop an old field. And it's almost a sure thing, if you do the if you do everything right, you will get a successful stand of switchgrass. So like I do have to recognize that. Like, there is a level of surety you get from planting switchgrass. You kind of know what you're gonna get. You don't necessarily know that with an old field. An old field is way more rewarding, but it's a it's a there's a heavy learning curve that I don't think a lot of people want to persist through. And then there is that kind of unknown, and you're not guaranteed that in two years it's gonna look awesome. When they look awesome, it's great, but sometimes it's you know five, six, seven years of just getting rid of this crap or not getting the response you want. And in some cases, you might need to plant a little, you know, switchgrass or native warm season grass to kind of carry that plant community. So I think it's I think it's a little bit of fear of the unknown.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 42:51

What I'm picking up from you, Mariah, is you're essentially saying switchgrass is ryegrass in a food plot comparison. Meaning we talk time and time again about do deer eat ryegrass? Yeah, they will. But it's an availability issue. There are other plants that are better, but will you, can you observe deer eating ryegrass? Yes, you can. But it is so depends on depends on what options do deer have food-wise. So to me, it sounds like can switchgrass make for a successful bedding area? It can, but it's probably not first choice. But deer will go there and gravitate towards it based on what they have available in the landscape.

Moriah Boggess 43:39

And I think that's why we don't see switchgrass plantings being successful in the south, because we are not cover limited in the south. When you go in the Midwest, where it's so common, yeah. I mean, when you have a cover limited landscape and you put some really dense cover, even if it's crap, and that's the only cover like deer gonna be in it. But I would love To take on anyone in their switchgrass, if I had the same amount of space and time to develop a really good old field, I'm gonna have a lot better deer use in that old field than switchgrass. I think I can I think I can pull deer out of that switchgrass into a a more representative native plant community that actually has the structure that deer are looking for.

Are Drone Surveys Necessary for Good Deer Management?

Bonner Powell 44:20

Yeah. And my thing, Mariah, is with like the old field management and and yeah, it does take a little work and it's a little bit of a process, but it's much harder for, say, upland game birds, you know, quail, turkeys, especially if you want them to use it for brooding, it's a lot harder there than it is for deer. Like if we can just get if we can get three-quarters of the way there where 75% of the plant community is is all native and there's decent structure, deer are going to use that no problem. You know, they're not limited by, let's say, a little bit of fescue or Bermuda grass at ground level because deer are never this tall. You know what I'm saying? Like they come out of the womb big enough to to take care of what they need to take care of. So I think, you know, when we talk about early successional fields, old fields for deer management, I think it can be a pain in some areas where you have extreme problems with invasives and non-natives. But by and large, you know, it's fairly easy to get it 75% of the way there. Now, once you start dialing that last 25%, it can be very frustrating. But the initial getting deer in there, get them to use it, it having some forage value during the summertime and some cover value during the fall, man, that's that's easy peasy. We knock that one out of the park. But going back to the drones a little just a little bit, who in in y'all's opinion, this is what I want to hear from y'all, who needs a drone survey? Which properties need a drone survey? Is it, you know, if you can't afford to do a drone survey every year, what's your interval? And, you know, if you've never had a drone survey done and you're just getting into really managing a property, is it best to do one now or should I wait a couple years? What's y'all's thoughts?

Moriah Boggess 46:19

Hmm.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 46:20

Well, I need to think about this. Um I might have to revise my answer later. I guess I feel no one needs it. Now that's pretty powerful to say that, but I say it from the perspective of we've been managing deer for a long time without drone surveys, and we've been pretty dang good at it. So I think the tools that we use of reading habitat and deer condition is absolutely sufficient. But I would say, kind of like we talked about earlier, it is another tool, an optional tool, and it will give you an instantaneous snapshot. We might read the habitat and the condition of the deer and go, there's too many, or everything's just right. The survey can give you a number more or less within a day. If as long as you qualify that, yes, that is the number of deer that we estimate to be on this property on this day. And that number may be different tomorrow, but it could give you some very, very quick insight into your deer density habitat relationship. But it's not needed, but it's cool. And it does complement, it complements, it augments the other tools that we use.

Moriah Boggess 47:44

Yeah, I think I think it's a good, it can be a good stand-in if maybe yeah, you're new on a property and you're really trying to get an idea of where you stand, or you've had some gaps in your data collection over the years and you're you're kind of trying to fill in. So, like to Bronson's point, there's obviously ways that we can be just as confident in the deer population without dealing with drones, but it's also so often not a perfect world. And I think having that flexibility and that ability to pull in the drone is really cool. And I'm glad that we do have it. I know we're using it a lot. I've also just realized that if we only would just talk about the ins and outs of hinge cutting now, we could have covered the trifecta of all the over-prescribed practices. Drones, switchgrass, and pr and uh hinge cutting, at least in my opinion. All things that have their place and that we use. We're not against any of these things. They're just not always the answer. And that's I think where it becomes problematic.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 48:39

Context. Of when you use them and where and why, yeah. Yeah.

Conditions, Operators, and Survey Error

Moriah Boggess 48:45

So one other thing, and then I I think we could be done with the drones, but we kind of talked about observability and how it's not perfect and and why it's better as an index. The other thing that affects observability that I failed to mention before, and I would be remiss if I didn't, is that conditions really matter with drone surveys. Any pilot out there knows that, and and you know, they'll work usually work with you when you hire a pilot to find a good day to fly. Unless you have one that's overbooked, then I can't guarantee they might try to fly on a marginal marginal conditions. I prefer the the flights that are during the day because it's just so much quicker and easier to identify dear if you're doing that. But no two days are created equally. I mean, if the sun pops out for a minute, you can start to get some of these hot spots. If you know the temperature differential is just, you know, the the the temperature is just a little bit higher or lower, that can also affect things. And so that hiring a different operator year to year can also seemingly affect it. You know, any kind of good survey, you try to keep the same observer every year because there is observer bias. I don't care what anyone tells you. Even something that should be simple. Like if I'm doing a plant survey with Bonner, we should keep the for each plant community, we should try to keep the same observer because I might might misidentify something. And at least I'm consistent in my misidentification. You know, like any good survey, you do that. And so that's just another layer of air and something to keep in mind. You try to control as much of that air as possible, but I mean, you know, one drone operator is gonna get overbooked or go out of business, you're gonna have to switch. And I think it's good to at least consider that and and keep that in mind when you're considering the whole of your properties. Like there's all these things that affect the value of that data. It doesn't make the data invaluable, it just affects how much we can rely on it.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 50:48

Agree a hundred percent. Then, you know, we did was it last year? So I'm not a drone operator. We'll tag along and look, do that quite often. But I know on the same property, I don't know if it was consecutive days or two days apart, but within one week, we had probably a 30 to 40 percent difference in what we observed. And that could have been observer error, it could have been conditions, but these were nighttime, so we can take kind of take the sun out of it because it began and ended after sunset. So don't don't know exactly why that was. We're more deer bedded and cover and we miss them. Was it the operator? And no disrespect to them because I'm sitting there looking as well, trying to count stuff, but yeah, just same property three or four days apart. There was about a 40% difference in deer detection. Could have been the main question. Bronson, are there uh did the rabbit population explode though? There were a greater number of rabbits on the second one and raccoons. Yeah. And Bonner, you hit the nail on the head. That was a that was a moon effect. Oh Lord. I thought you'd like that one.

Moriah Boggess 52:10

You know they go under a rock. I was joking about that when we were flying the other day, and we're like, we're not seeing whatever corner of the property is many bucks. And I was like, oh, they've gone nocturnal. Can't see them with the drone, they've gone nocturnal. Yeah.

Final Takeaways: Technology vs Expertise

Dr. Bronson Strickland 52:23

Yeah. Good stuff. Well, hey, let's um maybe wrap up with the point that we wanted to do is we're trying to educate people, and we're on the education journey ourselves. We're always learning, adapting. And what we wanted to inform people about is the new drone craze. There, there's a reason for it. It's it's really interesting. It's it's a way you can go out and get a snapshot in one day or one evening, but just keep things in context. You know, we we hear in society all the time now about how AI and robots are going to just replace the human workforce. And this is gonna be an example of these drones are cool and those sensors are tool. It does not replace a good deer biologist. In putting the information that you're getting from that technology into the context of how you're going to manage that population.

Closing Remarks and Where to Learn More

Moriah Boggess 53:23

Yeah. And it doesn't replace good hunter observation data, doesn't replace trail camera data, it sure doesn't replace aging on the hoof. Harvest data. Yeah. I I heard uh little bird told me that Bonner's gonna make all his harvest decisions from a drone from now on. Yeah.

Bonner Powell 53:42

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 53:45

Okay.

Moriah Boggess 53:46

All right. Well, thanks, guys. Let's let's be done with this one, and then we can tackle the other related question, which is how many deer are on my property and do I really care? Sounds good. Enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to the Wildlife Investments podcast. For more information on these topics or to see some of the projects our team is working on, follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Wildlife Investments, or visit wildlifeinvestments.com.