How to Make the Most of Analytics When Hunting Deer

I’m a baseball geek. As a kid, I kept a scorebook while my dad and I watched our favorite team, the Chicago Cubs, on television. After the game, I would hurry to my room and calculate batting and earned run averages and tally runs batted in, home runs, steals, strikeouts and the like.

That intel wouldn’t go very far these days. We are in the analytics era of sports. Teams track, accumulate and analyze data to build models that enable them to put the best lineup possible on the field or court. Advanced statistics models, machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics help general managers, coaches and players make data-driven decisions both in terms of player evaluation and in-game strategy.

There’s debate about whether hunting is a sport; we’ll save that for another article. However, as with sports, we are living in the analytics age of hunting, especially when it comes to whitetail hunting. As a data nerd, I pay close attention to the reams of information my cellular and digital trail cameras provide. Beginning in July, I start locking in on early-season buck patterns. With the season more than 90 days away at that point, the use of cellular cameras in my home state of Colorado is permitted, and the intel they provide is invaluable.

FILM SESSION

I use seven Moultrie Edge 2 Pro cameras on my whitetail dirt. Beginning on September 1, I start requesting high-resolution videos with audio of any shooter bucks near my stand sites. Video footage tells us many things pictures do not. Typically, I can tell where a deer came from and, depending on the camera’s location and pre-determined video run time, where it went. Using Moultrie’s Interactive Maps via the Moultrie app, I drop an array of pins and build my deer property on a digital map I can access anytime, anywhere.

Using specific, icon-labeled pins, I drop them on water sources, tree stands, blinds, food plots, trail cam locations, pinch points and other key geographic features. With my property on a digital map, I track daily deer movements and record which deer appear at which cameras and when. (Despite all this tech at my fingertips, there is still some old-school in me, as I prefer to keep a written whitetail journal.)

Digital mapping apps like HuntStand and onX feature trail camera integration, where users can save images from each camera and add notes. Using these mapping apps, you can organize and analyze trail camera data with minimal effort.

Moultrie’s app takes your camera’s data further and creates Activity Charting, which allows you to identify peak movement times with a dashboard that provides 30-day data analysis, and you can click on the individual cameras to see peak movement times for each. If you turn on Moultrie’s Smart Tag A.I. Species Recognition when you deploy your cameras, you can see how many does and how many bucks have appeared on each camera, view those photos and see peak movement times for those cameras. Concerning analytics, Species Recognition combined with Activity Charting is a game changer. Activity Charting compiles all the data for you. All you have to do is take the time to click through it. Activity Charting also provides immediate temperature and moon phase info.

HuntStand’s Whitetail Activity Forecast is available to HunstStand Pro users, and I’ve yet to discover a program with a better algorithm when it comes to deer movement. The Whitetail Activity Forecast predicts daily peak movement times by the hour and provides peak rut dates based on your geographic location. I’m also discovering that I can compare and contrast Moultrie’s Activity Charting with HuntStand’s Whitetail Activity Forecast and develop what I feel is a top-tier daily whitetail hunt program.

WEATHER WATCHING

Weather dictates every whitetail hunt. You can’t beat the animal’s nose, so you always need to know what the wind is doing. I prefer hunting big bucks when the wind is marginal, meaning it’s just right enough for me and wrong enough for them. Though a swirl at the wrong time or a southwest wind suddenly turning straight south typically means the game is over, my data shows big bucks move past stand sites more when they feel like they have the wind in their favor. This data is confirmed at all phases of the rut. My last three big-buck kills have come on sits with a marginal wind.

My data also tells me that a day with a barometer reading of more than 30.0 inches of mercury (inHg) that is stable or rising is a day to get my butt in a stand. Using apps like Moultrie, HuntStand and onX, I get real-time weather and moon intel with hourly updated readings of temperature, pressure, wind direction and more.

I also play the moon phase and do well on days with a rising moon in the afternoon, full-moon days and mornings during a waning gibbous phase, which follows the full moon. I use past weather and moon data, combined with deer movement analytics, to predict the days I will need to be in the stand, which is essential for those of us with limited time to chase North America’s favorite big-game animal.

Today, a decade into the whitetail analytics game, I have more valuable intel at my disposal than ever. I can look back at years and years of daily journaling to put pieces of a puzzle together, and I can quickly scan through photos and app-recorded data. It’s remarkable.

How you use and take advantage of deer analytics is up to you. The curmudgeons among us will read this and roll their eyes with disgust, and that’s fine. To each their own. As for me, I will use every analytical tool available to me to make informed decisions on when and where I should hunt. We work too hard and put in too much time trying to kill mature deer not to use modern-day technologies that help us win in the woods.

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• This article was featured in the September 2025 issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe.