Mule Deer Fanatic

Mr. Michael Turk, of DC – yes that’s DC, formerly of New Mexico, wrote me to explain a deer tracking project using a GPS device and a free map service. One of the animals they are tracking is a buck named Thor. Thor looks a little like a whitetail, but is really a mule deer – you can tell by the size. He looks pretty suave with his collar, don’t you think? How would you like to track a big buck, like this, for a while?
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The man who invented this tracking approach identifies himself as “Siberian Tracker”. I think he is pretty clever. Here is what he says about it,

“Mail to Map/SMS-to-Map/Mail to GE service: new twist in (r)Evolution

The idea of creating a simple “Mail-to-Map” service came when I was tracking White-Tailed Deer in the suburbs of Pennsylvania. The GPS coordinates were send by the collared deer as a SMS/Text Message via GSM/cell-phone networks to a server in Sweden, and then relayed to my e-mail account. I was surprised to find out that there was no way for me to gain access to the server, so the creation of dynamic kml/kmz files straight from the server was out of the question. All what I was left with was a set of e-mails with 8 coordinates in each.

Here is my first attempt for a solution, which reads coordinates in e-mail and relays coordinates in real-time to the Google-Earth/Google Map service. I believe this is the fist successful solution of Mail-to-Map service which is based entirely on free web services.”

To see the map go here: http://www.potapov-nature.com/forBA/deer/deer-pert.html

As for Mr. Turk, he was a successful Mule Deer hunter in SE New Mexico, where his family owns a sizeable ranch, by harvesting this 10pt. (Eastern Count) buck mule deer. The buck has an extra cheater which is not visible in the picture. This buck was harvested in 2007. According to Mr. Turk, the herd numbers were down, but his party managed to harvest several nice bucks.

Thank you for the information, Mr. Turk.