Pre-Season Scouting with Google Earth

It is not every day I get to break serious new ground in deer hunting, but I have found something with Google Earth that I simply must tell. I have been able to find actual deer trails and deer bedding areas on Google Earth. It is not easy, but it can be done.

We were long overdue for an update on Google Earth. The last image I had was from 2010. Over the winter, we finally got an updated image, and it was extremely high resolution. I can easily pick out the lawn furniture at the Thoughtful Spot. It was shot mid-September of last year, before haying. It just so happens I had been over the ground with Angus looking for new blind sites for his first year going solo, so I know what was there. We had seen trails going through the pastures as well as a few bedding sites we had previously missed.

I was on Google Earth looking things over, and it suddenly hit me: those trails were there! Those bedding sites were there too! I had to know what I was looking at, but they were there– subtle, but there. It took a special set of circumstances.

1) The grass had started to go dormant. It was tall in these bedding areas, and the tops were still green while the base of the plants were losing color. That meant the bowl-shaped beds showed up as bright circles.

2) The trails took more doing. Google Earth has a compass control in the upper right corner. If you grab the N(North) icon with your mouse, you can rotate the view around 360 degrees. I have the Terrain Exaggeration set to 1. You might have to play with this setting to get the effect. However, if you grab the compass control and rotate the view at a moderate rate back and forth, your eyes get a better illusion that you are looking at something other than a flat image. With a little work, I could see distinct striations in the tall grass as deer trails. Here is an example. Go to West Fork Dam, Cincinnati, Ohio, and then navigate over to here:

39°14’52.51″ N 84°30’06.11″ W

This is part of the Hamilton C ounty Park District now, but it used to be a place I roamed as a kid. There are a lot of deer there, and I tested the technique on several known spots. The white spots in the grass are beds. The striations in the grass are trails leading to the beds.

There net result of this discovery is that I have found a couple new bedding areas on the farm as well as a few well-traveled trails through the tall grass. I am going to exploit them this season, and have gone and ordered a couple of new ladder stands. More on that later.

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