Solving the mystery of buck bedding! Whitetail GPS Study w/ Dr Bronson Strickland

In this video we do a DEEP DIVE on all things buck bedding with Mississippi State University's Dr. Bronson Strickland! MSU has conducted a series of GPS studies on free-range whitetail deer in Mississippi. They specifically looked at things like buck bedding, buck travel and more. Subjects include:
- Is there really such a thing as a "buck's bedroom"?
- What the data says about how often bucks re-visit SPECIFIC beds
- "Anchors" that hold bucks in an area
- How many beds does a buck have on average?
- The actual distances bucks travel outside of the rut, vs in the rut
and TONS more! This is a must-listen episode and you are going to want to share this with your hunting buddies!
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[@thecedarridgechronicles]

My favorite thing about y’all’s approach to hunting education is y’all’s ability to set aside your egos, biases, and opinions and turn them into questions. By getting someone else’s take on a situation before voicing y’all’s opinion you really get a great amount of info that is unique to the guest, hunter, or researcher. It makes the podcasts all about the information, not about y’all’s promotion, and it is so helpful for the listener. Once again, great podcast.

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

Thanks buddy!

[@jpierce1184]

From someone whose work is data-driven and research oriented, it’s awesome that y’all have people on the podcast who do robust studies and who can interpret the primary data in a hunting context. It also helps contextualize a lot of the anecdotes from some other big buck killers y’all have on. Would love to hear more content like this, and you’re right - we need to fund a grad student to answer these questions! There’s so much available data that just needs the right code. Keep up the awesome content fellas.

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

That’s some great feedback and we appreciate you watching! The second episode from this interview will come out next Monday so make sure you don’t miss it!

[@ukjw2]

Keep in mind, these data driven people don’t kill big bucks.

[@jpierce1184]

Based on ep 540, I’d put some money on Jacob asking if they’ve looked at differences between 5/6 year olds versus 2/3 year olds. Looking forward to part 2.

[@ukjw2]

@@jpierce1184 ya but it’s a rut study. A lot of the specific bed hunters hunt early beds…summer habits. After that they will tell you about the same thing this study says.

[@cameronlancaster2456]

Everytime Jacob says "select cut pines" I hear "slut cut pines" 😂

[@curtismerriman9956]

Great job at asking questions guys. Another thing to consider on highly pressured national forest is the fact that only certain personality types of bucks make it to maturity. Not the rut crazy ones live past 1 1/2

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

Excellent point!

[@sniper12589]

You guys are spot on talking about how different it is in the Midwest. I’m located in north east Indiana and you have small blocks of woods 3-5-20 acre blocks 400-800 yards apart. You can blow out your woods easily. We hunted a 20 acre woods getting lots of deer on camera but my buddy could never could get an arrow in one. About 1000 yards across the street is a 2.5 acre woods that no one hunts and I told him that’s where the deer are at. He blew it off thinking I was crazy until one night he sent me a video from his front porch of more than a dozen deer breaching cover right at dark from that woods. Yes you can look around and pick out where the deer might be but the key around my area for good bucks is to look at the small grassy strips along creeks and ditches. Or a random tree out in the middle of a farm field surrounded by less than a quarter acre of brush. Everyone around here are in the woods but always get big big bucks on camera but hardly ever see them and it’s all bc they hold tight to those ditch cover that’s always over looked.

[@chasearmstrong6742]

This is amazing content. Hats off to Mississippi State for coming on the podcast and helping clarify and share some new research with the public.

[@Ben_Allgood]

Awesome content. I think this can be carried over to the midwest. Y'all could do an interview with Dan Storm at the Wisconsin DNR who is doing similar studies in agricultural areas. He has maps showing mature bucks bouncing from bedding area to bedding area there too. I know this is a southern centric podcast, but it would be interesting for y'all to do a similar interview with Dr. Jacob Haus at Bemidji State in Minnesota. He's doing a gps study there deer in a more urban environment. It would neat to see the differences environmental factors can play on buck behavior.

[@chrisgarrison1158]

Awesome podcast. You Jacob definitely taught something today. Don’t spend much time hanging cameras on those really big beds that are obviously in the open during the rut. lol

[@justinschultz764]

I tried beast tactics down here in the south for a couple years and wondered if I was crazy because I could never find reliable buck bedding. Thanks to podcasts like yours and studies like this I now know I wasn’t do anything wrong it just works different down here.

[@ukjw2]

Weird….there are guys in Florida who do it. As southern as it gets.

[@justinschultz764]

@@ukjw2 cool story bro

[@ukjw2]

@@justinschultz764 no worries, you’ll figure it out.

[@shaneshonda]

​@ukjw2 Florida is the red headed step child of the south.

[@tacticalwhitetailmappingso5118]

Even in the Midwest they play the numbers game on bedding… not every bed is good… not every spot is consistent… and where u have more options u can have less consistency… u have to look at other variables outside of bed and feed… bc in some states in the south that’s everywhere is what u think but really it’s not…

[@caseyrayburn5887]

I live in the north east (northern NY) I would LOVE to see a study done up in this area. I got a public giant a few years ago and have been hunting a farm with monsters since. Would be awesome to see their patterns in a different landscape than the south

[@buck16]

Great study. One observation no one usually mentions is that as the season moves on and the Bucks get to the food plots later and later it coincides with the fact that their routes have gradually lost more and more leaves on the bushes, shrubs, and small and large trees making them feel more vulnerable and therefor making them move later and later.

[@topJimmyP1984]

Excellent deer information!!! Thx

[@gordonwagner6932]

Very educational and l enjoyed. It very much.😊😊

[@robertshepard8482]

Great content!

[@chattahoocheeoutdoorsman4865]

Finally got to watch this one. Great episode fellas! I guess I'm the only one with eyes here. Andrew I'm going to be needing one of those next weekend 😎

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

We will have a pile of em 😎

[@ec9697]

One more thing about KS,most cornfields are picked by thanksgiving..yeah you have less bucks but..every year there are big ones that make it..since they have pretty well Managed herds.

[@scottfrederick8299]

If I was going back to Kansas (Have not been in 6 years) I would personally want to be there from right before Halloween through the first 10 days of November. I took 4 book deer in 4 years, 2 of which where taken on October 31, one at 11:30, then exactly 1 year and 15 minutes later (out of the same tree) I haversted my largest bow kill ever. The year pior, my hunting partner harvested a mature 10 out of the same tree during this time period (last of Oct - first of Nov.). This was not guided hunts, but was on private lands.

[@curtismerriman9956]

Andrew asked how would you kill the buck taking different trail to and from a bedding area. Use Natures corn pile AKA scrapes. It’s a target in a sea of timber. Picking the times they like to visit them might be the nail in the coffin.

[@nathanlester5054]

Great podcast and excellent guest. One thing going forward; it would be great for the guest to be the one talking the most. Jacob, you asked some great questions but it appeared to he your podcast, not the guest's.

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

We definitely got wordy on this episode no doubt! Part two next week is a great one and we are looking forward to getting Bronson back on the show this summer so let us know if you would like any specific topics to be covered with him! Thanks for watching and the feedback brother!

[@user-oi1wo6rh8t]

Great episode! I’d like to hear more, specifically on the travel routes. The gps simulator showed all the bed sites and travel routes taken over a period of time. When the simulator stopped we were left with the map of bed sites and travel routes, some of which intersected each other, and some intersections were very dense. If that simulation could be run only with legal hunting hours I’d love to see the difference and focus on the highest density intersections. Essentially “where is he most vulnerable during legal hours and if there is any correlation to what is there”. It would be incredibly tough to kill him in his bed, or to know exactly where he’s bedded (1/4 chance roughly speaking), so specifically look at the highest density intersections and on average what time/times of day he was in them

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

That is an excellent idea! We will bring it up to Dr. Strickland for a future episode.

[@northernboers5969]

This study is great for the area with relatively low predation(coyotes, bobcats) but we have to understand areas with high predation areas(Timberwolves, mountain lions). In the area we hunt in there is high predation. A human/ coyotes and a pack of wolves are two completely different threats to deer. I'd like to see this study in a high predation areas. I think the bedding areas would become more pronounced to security cover and how they use the wind to their advantage.

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

On that note make sure you tune it for the part 2 to this episode that comes out Monday. For a study like what your asking for you would need to have a DNR or University in the North to conduct that study.

[@MrSquidwardGames]

40 mins in, very good!

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

We are glad you are enjoying it! Part 2 will come out next Monday.

[@doncampbell1961]

i have always wondered if deer are not coming out closer to dark or after dark , not because of pressure but because its getting dark earlier. he comes out early sept at 7 pm two hurs before sunset , but a month later its a half hour before and a month after that its dark but its still 7 pm.

[@randythompson7497]

love it

[@twilliger22]

Deer follow the saw!

[@austenstults8707]

Man those hats are 🔥

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

They are going live on our website on Monday the 1st!

[@jmlochala]

In relation to deer movement, do they know where the rub lines, scrapes, food sources and licking branches are somewhere in their day to day movements

[@kylebell850]

Please do a study in the Bankhead forest.

[@NManitou]

Is the white paper available for download?

[@stdavis22]

take a drink every time Andrew says "like"

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

There wouldn’t be many sober viewers then 🤣

[@jimmybradley6654]

How often do they get up and drink?

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

Great question and we never got to cover that on this episode. It would be interesting if they even looked at that with the study.

[@karmas.busdriver]

It's not really controversy, its agenda & marketed products, vs actual scientific research. The people who's products get debunked by sound science don't want to lose money, so they try to discredit it, or narrative spin how it some how doesn't apply outside their study area.

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

That’s a good point. You see a lot more people talking about bed hunting in the Midwest but a lot of their habitat is much different from us southerners. So we are sure that can work well in specific habitat types but when a lot of those hunters hear about these topics it seems to get them fired up. But what we see down here in the data and what they experience isn’t apples to apples. Hopefully a university in the Midwest will do a similar study but in an area with more agricultural.

[@karmas.busdriver]

@@thesouthernoutdoorsmen Even in the swamps, we under stand that a Buck bed thats a fortress with one wind direction is a tomb from another.

[@karmas.busdriver]

If it's easy He's probably not Home.😁

[@karmas.busdriver]

When The Hunting Public talked about buck nests, There's much less bedding cover up here where hunting pressure doesn't effectively go, and often we jump multiple Bucks in prime bedding cover. Like Dan Infalt calls satellite bedding.

[@doncampbell1961]

@@thesouthernoutdoorsmen I hunt Michigan and only public. I never see Bucks use the same Bed all the time. I see them use the same bedding area that is maybe 30 acres. And Im hunting 10,000 acres of mostly river bottom that 50 percent bedding and grass.

[@naimliss4488]

How does any deer have 55 beds in 14 days.

[@thesouthernoutdoorsmen]

Exactly what the study showed. It’s pretty wild.

[@Crayz919]

I can believe that here in central north Carolina