Learning from High School Students Part 1

If you know much about me, you know I've got a pretty good gig going. For the past fifteen years, I've taught agricultural science at Childress High School. I know, you may be thinking, "What does farming have to do with whitetails?"

Well, the answer is plenty.

After teaching for a couple of years I saw a need to incorporate wildlife management into my curriculum and did so enthusiastically and the kids responded in kind.

You may recall a few weeks ago my post on Deer School. As part of the curriculum, my students often pair up and do additional research on various topics related to deer or deer management. Over the next few posts, I will highlight the students' projects by presenting the abstracts of their award winning work.

In all, the circle is complete. I learn from their research and the students learn a lot from the time the spend on these problems.

I hope it helps you too...

-Russell Graves
Tejas






What's Coming to Dinner - The impact of deer feeders on white-tailed feeding habits

Deer hunting in Childress County, Texas is big business. Each year hunters from all over the state and nation descend on our county to hunt white-tailed deer. One of the most common practices hunters employ to help increase their success is by placing feeders where they hunt, filling them with corn, and setting the feeder timer to sling a measured amount of feed at a predictable time.

For this project, we developed the following hypothesis:

Deer feeders will increase a hunter's chance at harvesting a buck.

In our experiment, we documented how many does and bucks came to the feeders we monitored during the 2004 - 2005 deer season. In our experiment, we monitored three different feeders placed in random locations in the Childress County, Texas. Each feeder was set to dispense corn for three seconds at 7:30am and 5:00pm.

At each feeder, we placed motion-sensing cameras that would take a picture if an animal moved in front it and triggered the unit. We analyzed our data by going through these pictures taken and recording how many does and bucks were in the photos.

Early on, it was evident that in our experiment more does came to feeders than bucks. In total, we recorded 366 unique photos over two seasons.

In all, the percentage of deer coming to all of the feeders combined was 82% does to 18% bucks. Of the bucks that came to the feeders, only 17% would have scored 120 Boone & Crockett points and almost all of those came at night.

In our hypothesis, we stated that our outcome would be that the same amount of does and bucks would come to the feeders. We were proved wrong though because our experiment showed that more does come to feeders than bucks.

Labels: Texas