Weekly News 9/3/2010 

Have a wonderful Labor Day holiday weekend!  Checkout the bears in Virginia, just amazing to watch them climb the tree and shake the feeder for more food.

Lots of fawns at the main Georgia feeder daily now.  Fawns loose their spots at about 3 or 4 months of age.  We hope the fawns are all female ....they will probably stay in the area.  And of course, where the girls are .... the boys will be too!

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 Wednesday May 19th, I was on the West Loop Deer stand watching for hogs (none came out though) and saw two groups of deer.  The first group of four were pregnant does.  They have a pecking order if you will, and will rise up on their hind legs and flail away with their front legs.  There was a lot of flailing because the head doe wants the best food for herself.  She would allow a couple of the other does around her but even then would chase them some. They left after about forty minutes.  About thirty minutes later, here come the group  of four very skittish bucks.  They looked and watched everything. The does were much more, shall we say unconcerned? (Women - shopping!)

Did the bucks have a pecking order too you may ask?  Well, definitely yes, in fact more rigidly enforced than the does.  They were adamant about who ate what and very aggressive.  One chased a buck almost a 100 yards just to get the buck away.  Needless to say, that chased buck just left.  All the bucks had antlers in velvet of course, gradually forming the graceful antlers so much admired in whitetail deer. Was the buck with the largest antlers thus far the dominate buck?  NO!  It was in fact the #3 size of the four bucks.  Amazing.

In the deer stand was a small bird nest that I had to throw away.  During the does and bucks activity one of the parent birds came back and harassed me.  It (she/he - don't want to know), shrieked and flew all around me.  The does ignored the bird completely, but the bucks were a different story.  They froze often upon hearing the bird and constantly looked in my direction.  Remember that hunters.  Mad birds get a deer's attention!

Many of you may have seen similar events with whitetail deer.  This was not my first experience with the flailing, but it is always fun to watch ... and learn.

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Also, please note that we DO NOT USE trail cameras.  We notice some people on blogs and forums think those are the type cameras we use.  No, we use much more expensive Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) network IP cameras.  Most have optical zoom of 26X or more too.

The block at the main feeder in Georgia is a standard mineral block (kind used for cattle). The deer like the mineral block the best of any we have tried.  We've heard from many of you about different types of blocks.

All our cameras actually stream live video, we only show images every 10 seconds on the web site due to bandwidth restrictions.  Think of bandwidth like an interstate highway ... now you understand about congestion!

Many of the cameras are lighted at night. The Texas camera has lots of wildlife activity at night. The Dallas Ga feeder and Americus Ga feeder have night lights. Watch The lighted Kudzu camera for night activity also. We have streaming video back on the site for the general public.  This will be on at least one camera at a time. 

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Note: If a camera picture seems frozen or shows daylight where eastern daylight time is night, this means that camera is not sending images. We typically reboot the systems to get lazy cameras running. Also the cameras without any lights do shutoff just after dark and sometimes an image is partially sent. That's why you might see an image with a gray area.

New Camera Locations: We are looking for new camera locations. You must have power (120v), high-speed Internet, and LOTS OF GAME! Feeder locations are the best. Unfortunately, deer trails are not the ideal since deer just pass through too quickly. If you have a site and are interested, please email us with your information or questions: David @ WatchTheDeer.com

Many of you have asked about our incredible number of hits each day and month. Please read the section in our Advertise with Us for more information about Hits, page views and other web analytics. Remember- statistics is Greek for 'lies, lies and more lies'! :)

All images are live, running about 20-30 seconds behind real time.

Solar-Powered Camera: Click here to see our completely self-contained, solar powered, cellular camera system . Here's another view . Four 15Watt solar panels, a regulator, deep cycle marine battery in a plastic case, a Basic Camera unit, High gain antenna, Special PC card for internet service, and router in the equipment box. Checkout the Camera Page for more information.

Animal Views: Our cameras have a low IQ. They follow a pre-set schedule that stops at each view for a specific amount of time (usually 180 seconds). Unless a human is controlling the camera, it does not “know” when animals are in view. Unfortunately, that is why the cameras will sometimes move away from certain animal sightings.

Capturing Images: To save an image on the screen to your PC, simply right-click the image and save it to your desk top or disk.