Wouldn’t it be pretty easy now for the DCNR to do some kind of thermal drone density census for each county??

Not over my place. Drones ain't welcome.

That would be fine by me, long as I know when they're doing it so it doesn't mysteriously get shot down

I would think you would have enough willing participants to get plenty of samples from

No it’s not easy. Actually very time consuming

Negative.. the ADNR would have to admit that the deer population is more like a half a million rather than one million +.

I don't know about easy.

They don't have helicopters no more ?????

There are 16 other species designated as game animals. Why just deer? The adcnr is responsible for setting seasons and bag limits for all of them.

Exactly.

The cost to run a helicopter or a drone for any amount of time is a vast price difference

Sounds like something Eddie would say......Hmmmm....

So ,

Fill it up fly it in a straight line gather info . Why fly around and around one small spot .

Long run drones be the worst of the two. Chopper cover more ground faster .



Imo its all a waste of money.

Choppers can’t hover above a deer without spooking them, zoom in the camera, and see if it is a buck or doe. Or they might could, but I would think it would be really hard with the typical canopy Alabama has.

It would be very expensive to get any meaningful data. It would have to be done for years to have any data to compare. Then what to do with all that data? Something would have to be done to justify the cost even if it makes no sense.

To see if its a buck or doe ? Thats f$cking laughable . That is not even thinkable.

By the time they completed the survey the survey would be useless . Lol

What the dumb asses should have done before they rammed the worthless game check on us they should sent out 50,000 or 75,000 more survey letters out to hunters with better questions.

And spent a little money pushing it .


It's just bs bs and more bs and so many hunters just fall for it . I guess we hunters can pay just a few more dollars to pay for the survey , it just a few more dollars.

Well Frankie that’s what drone surveys do so no it’s not laughable, it is reality.

Drone surveys are a great snapshot of an exact number of a deer on a property at a given time. You can indeed get buck:doe ratios, ages and fawn recruitment as long as you have a good operator who can identify deer. The zooming capabilities of these drones is unbelievable.

But do it state wide ?

Heck no

I got a buddy starting drone recovery service

Gonna be hard to ever go away from art powers though😀

Last November we had a hunter fall out of his boat for some reason and drowned. I found the boat doing the death circle that night. Our department has one of those large thermal drones. One of our operators came met me that night with it and we flew the banks of the river hoping to find him up on the bank. We were unsuccessful at finding him but man did we figure out that there was a ton of deer that lived in those marshes on the edge of that river. I wish we’d kept track of the number of deer we saw that night. That drone has proved to be a very valuable tool for us but I can’t see where it could be used to survey animals on in a certain area. It would be interesting just to see what lives on our place in Monroe co.

No way. It’s not easy. It’s time consuming.

They could probably just ask the military for a decently high def infra-red Sat image and do it very easily.

I would bet you that the military has a program that can distinguish & count the types/sizes of animals.

I can fly at night and get a count on heat signatures but have no idea what they are. If I fly in the day it needs to be overcast and cool and it take a lot of work to see every deer. You can't see into young pines or bay trees. Here are a couple of daytime videos that show the thermal and zoom. I may do a night flight this weekend just to see the video.

cruising buck

7 PT buck

Here’s more along the lines of what I was thinking in practical terms……Don’t state biologists go out and give private landowners recommendations on how many deer to shoot??......All I’m saying is…..with the thermal technology we have now it would seem like that a drone census would be a helpful tool in making those recommendations……AND in doing so you would have a lot of compiled data to reference.

That would work better than doing a camera survey. I understand that a lot of the bigger drones can fly a grid and log every heat signature it sees with location so you can go back and check them. All you have to do is enter the property boundaries on the drone and wait until it runs the grid.

The state doing and a land owner doing it is two different things . CNC talking about the state doing it .

Most drones can't hover over a deer very long before spooking it either. Maybe long enough if it is just one or 2 deer together but several and they start running it would be hard to tell.

I can hover over a field full of deer until my battery runs down. When I first got my drone, I spooked deer but now I'm smooth on the controls and they could care less.

That’s not been my experience with it. I guess it depends on how good the zoom is on your camera.

I am not sure about the state biologists. The one that came out to my lease said we needed to kill 15 doe's the first year, and are their jawbones and then devise a plan. We haven't killed 15 deer in a season, much less 15 doe's.

For some reason they all seem bent on the wholesale slaughter of doe's. Seems like a dumb move when Coyote's are taking 45% of the fawns based on the study in GA.