Do any of you .... participate ?
Massachusetts
Do any of you guyz participate in this wildlife recording research ? Personally I have not, but it could be beneficial ... I think I will keep a log myself, next year...
Embarrassed to admit I didnt know they did this. I'm going to give it a shot and fill it in best I can. That's a great tool!
I keep a calendar - journal on everyday I hunt. Don't get caught up in it, I learned the hard way. Turkeys only gobble at such barometer levels, Deer only move on certain fronts, you need a particular wind for ducks to want to move etc. One of my closest friends just turned 80 this month, he tried to teach me long ago, but I wouldn't accept his wisdom. Several years ago it finally sunk in, somewhere a turkey is gobbling, somewhere a deer just got up to move, somewhere a duck just wanted to fly . Most importantly for me, that I learned, somewhere somebody wishes they had one more day to hunt, just one more. Just go hunt any days you can, life waits for nobody, at anytime !
Honestly Will... I didn't know either... :)
I have never filled one out. Maybe next year. NY actually mails a paper copy to you. Perhaps if Mass did more people would participate.
I've got 2 more hunts and my season is over. Then time to send it in.
I started writing this thing out. I e-mailed MDWF about having this as a writable document on our desktops or tablets that then could be sent in at the end of the year. I got an instant response saying they would look into it...... Maybe next year it will. Let's Go
I wrote to them asking for a poster of Mass fish types, and they sent it right away. Very responsive, I was impressed.
Here is a major problem!!!
• Mark total sightings during legal hunting hours. Do not try and count unique animals. We are calculating sightings per hour, not total animals. For instance, if you saw 3 does at 8:00 a.m., 1 buck at 10:00 a.m., and then 3 does at 11:00 a.m. at the same hunting area, you would put 1 antlered and 6 antlerless for sightings. If you saw an 8-point buck at 10:00 a.m. and then what you think was the same buck again at 1:00 p.m., you would put 2 for sightings. However, record as only 1 sighting if it was clearly the same animal or animals and it occurred in short period of time, such as within an hour.
Just the first three sentences lead me to believe they want to take out more animals than some of us are willing to shoot. Are they basing their data on total sightings or total individual animals? How many people in the woods are experienced enough to be able to tell the difference between individual deer on a regular basis. The 3 areas that I primarily hunted this year I have a stock pile of photos and can differentiate the deer upon sighting. I know what deer are residents and what deer are transient. If I saw the same two yearlings under my stand at 8 am then 6 hrs later I saw 3 deer a little ways off. How am I supposed to tell the difference. never mind someone who has just started hunting. Judging by what they told us to do we would have to put 5 sightings in that area. That almost doubles the deer density in that area. That will possibly lead to more deer tags in that area and less deer on the hoof than the previous couple years. What a confusing circle of data to review.
Good questions and great idea on the log but it has its gray areas that will still lead to inflated deer numbers in certain areas. It is a starting point and hopefully they can decipher the data and make logical decisions
I don't envy the state biologists
I think it would be interpretable for relative densities from one zone to the next, or just for rank-ordering densities across zones. Maybe they use it as a backup, or comparator, to see how it stacks up against their density determinations derived by other means.
I think if you keep this log (I didn't) and turn it in, you have a chance to win some kind of prize.
