Abstracts

Abstract: Deer-vehicle collision (DVC) data has been used to determine the period of peak breeding behavior of whitetailed deer. However, this only provides county level information about the chronology of reproduction. To assess the effectiveness of using passive cameras to determine the timing of the rut at smaller spatial scales, we deployed 30 passive IR cameras (1 camera/60 acres) within five wildlife management areas (WMA) in different regions of Georgia, USA. Weekly activity patterns were assessed using count data to determine peak activity periods of male whitetails, which were then compared to DVC data obtained from a previous study estimating the timing of the rut. Changes in diurnal and nocturnal behavior were also compared using data from before, during, and after the period of peak movement. We collected 21,352 images of deer across the five study sites between October 2019 and January 2020. We found a significant relationship between DVCs and camera detections at two study areas, while the association was weaker at the other three sites. However, our estimates of the "rut week" based on camera detections were consistently in agreement with the breeding period identified using county-level DVC data. At three of the five study sites, males exhibited heightened daytime