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2 minute read
Research Your Way To Big Bucks
With A Tool You’re Probably Not Using
By Brady Miller
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Originally published at GOHUNT.com
If you’ve been following some of the tactics I talk about in previous articles, seminars, podcasts, or videos, you’ll hear me mention a lot about the power of education and being a student of the game when it comes to hunting. A hidden gem I feel people overlook when it comes to adding information to your “hunting toolbox” can be found in reading biology reports!
I get a lot of emails and messages from hunters each year asking about my approach to finding biology-based information for mule deer, as well as what I’m reading book wise. As most of you know, I love helping others. So it’s finally time I put out an article on this subject. You can also find elk biology reports or other species using this same method, but since I’m a mule deer hunter, this is based on my favorite animal.
How to find biology reports?
Biology reports and peer-reviewed research studies are pure GOLD! I say it a lot, but for the most part, wildlife’s daily actions are rooted in biology and science. To be a better hunter, it’s best to know everything you can about the animal you’re trying to hunt and find. I’m always trying to expand my knowledge in different facets of hunting techniques, and learning about animal biology ranks up there at the top of my list of what I do each year to gain a slight edge.
Back in August, I talked to Mark Livesay on our Big Hunt Guys podcast, and I dove into finding these research studies. Mark and I are cut from the same cloth and do a ton of very similar things when it comes to e-scouting and educating ourselves on animal behavior. While talking about research studies, it was interesting that Mark had not heard of Google Scholar. So I thought I should expand on this information and release this article so more people can learn about this technique.
Everyone knows that you can always do a standard Google search for some studies and pretty much find endless items on the internet, but the true power, in my personal opinion, lies in Google Scholar.
WHAT EXACTLY IS GOOGLE SCHOLAR?
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Google Scholar is a free academic web search engine that pulls scholarly literature across different publications.
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Google Scholar is a lot like your standard Google search engine, but it’s more of an academic search engine for research-based studies. You can search specific keywords or phrases to hone in on areas of research that interest you. In the example above, you can see I searched for mule deer migration, and it gave me a bunch of articles directly related to this subject.
When it comes to mule deer, I use the following terms a lot:
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• Migration
• Telemetry
• Habitat use
• Buck movement
• Predation
• Breeding
• Winter range
There are a lot of other terms you could search for; those are just some items to get you started. If you want to narrow down your search, you can put keywords in quotes.
Note: you might not be able to find detailed wildlife studies in the same area you’re planning on hunting, but the studies and information you find can be extrapolated to where you hunt.
If the article you’re interested in has a [PDF] or a [HTML] link to the right of the articles, you will be able to click on that link to read/download them. If they do not have those links, then most likely you’ll either need to pay for them or access them through a university or library login. More on how to access those further down in this article. Once you click on an article that allows free access, you’ll be able to read it, save it and download it to your computer.
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