• The SH Membership has gone live. Only SH Members have access to post in the classifieds. All members can view the classifieds. Starting in 2020 only SH Members will be admitted to the annual hunting contest. Current members will need to follow these steps to upgrade: 1. Click on your username 2. Click on Account upgrades 3. Choose SH Member and purchase.
  • We've been working hard the past few weeks to come up with some big changes to our vendor policies to meet the changing needs of our community. Please see the new vendor rules here: Vendor Access Area Rules

Hunting Journaling/Record Keeping

Owl74

Active Member
Joined
Jan 2, 2019
Messages
107
Greetings Folks,
I've hunted my whole life (besides taking a decade off during college/early career). I got serious about hunting three years ago after changing my life health wise and losing a bunch of weight. In these last three years I took up saddle hunting and started hitting public land hard (before that I just hunted my own property and had a couple of easy leases). I'm just now learning a hard lesson from these last three years - I'm at the point where I've forgotten more hunting and scouting information than I'm remembering. I'm aware that a lot of very successful hunters keep detailed records/journals (John Eberhart, Warren Womack, etc.). Do you keep records/journals? If so, what does that look like (paper? electronic?) and what kinds of information are you tracking?
Also, if anyone here has been a Spartan Forge beta tester, can you tell me about the new journaling feature in the Spartan Forge app (and if it'll be available to the public before hunting season)?
Thanks all!
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: CB1
all specific scouting data gets logged in OnX, but I also log encounters both during scouting and during the season in google calendar. It allows me to see obvious patterns that happen every year. I log where I hunted, how many deer I saw etc.
 
I started journaling my hunts a few years ago and include things like date / time of hunt, where I ended up sitting, temp, wind speed and direction, deer seen and direction of travel. I like paper so I can doodle maps
 
I don’t currently but have been meaning to. onX is great for spots but journaling would be a good way to remember more details. Or even refresh on cool encounters.
 
My wife is a middle school English teacher and bought me a few nice journals a couple of years ago to encourage me to keep track of some of this stuff. I started it, and in true to me fashion, was WAY too long winded and it became a chore. I am hoping to do a better job this year with capturing the important stuff and leaving out all of the other. At some point, I do want to story tell to have something for my kids to look back on some day, but I need to be consistent with capturing the highlights first.
 
I keep a log on my phone.
Date
AM or PM hunt
Stand location/name
Temperature
Wind direction
Barometric pressure
General weather ie; cloudy, sunny, etc…
Sightings
Notes about encounters (feeding, cruising, etc..)
The most helpful when referring back has been wind direction and determining prevailing direction for time of year.
 
I use the Huntstand App, and the tools for entering a sighting tracks the weather for that day. You just set the kind of sighting (tracks, turds, actual animal sighting) and it logs all the other stuff for you based on the weather data for that area. If you use the offline map, it records this data once you synch it when you have signal. It also has a notes section so you can write about the encounter. Its cool too to pull up a map and see all of your sightings, so you can really narrow down to areas you want to focus on based on that information.
 
Back
Top