01 — Real capture
Not just how many.
What they are.
A count on its own tells you very little. Thermal at the right altitude resolves body size, posture and antler structure — so animals can be classed as buck or doe, mature or young, rather than logged as anonymous heat.
Resolves
Antler structure
Classifies
Buck · doe · fawn
Sees through
Brush & darkness
Coverage
Whole property
02 — Deliverables
What you
get back
The numbers a management plan is built on — and the imagery behind every one of them, dated and located on your ground.
01
Population count
Animals observed across the ground flown, with the marked imagery they were counted from — and density expressed per acre so it compares year to year.
02
Sex & class breakdown
Buck-to-doe ratio and observable age classing where the imagery supports it — the figures that actually drive a harvest decision.
03
Distribution map
Where animals actually were — bedding cover, food sources, travel corridors and the ground they are not using at all.
04
Season-on-season baseline
Fly the same ground each year and herd trend becomes measurable — whether the management plan is working, in numbers.
03 — Why thermal
Trail cameras
count visits,
not animals
A trail-camera study samples the few places you hung cameras, over weeks, and cannot tell you whether it photographed forty deer or the same eight deer forty times. Spotlight counts miss everything in cover and everything beyond the beam.
A thermal census samples the whole property inside a single window, when the animals are up and moving. Every warm body in the flight path is recorded once — which is what makes the resulting number defensible.
- Animals bedded in cover
- Still read as heat
- Full dark
- Best contrast of the cycle
- Whole property in one window
- No double counting
- No bait, no pressure
- Behaviour unaltered
04 — How it runs
01
Plan
Property boundaries, cover types and food sources reviewed, and the flight timed to the window when animals are up and ground temperature has dropped away.
02
Fly
Systematic transects at an altitude that keeps animals undisturbed while holding enough resolution to classify them. Thermal and RGB recorded together.
03
Classify
Every signature reviewed, classed where the imagery allows, and overlaps between transects reconciled so no animal is counted twice.
04
Deliver
Count, ratios, distribution map and the marked imagery — a dataset a biologist or a lease committee can actually work from.
05 — Who books this
Managers,
leases, owners
Hunting leases & clubs
Set harvest numbers on evidence rather than argument, and show members what the property is actually carrying going into the season.
Land owners & managed properties
Track herd health and density across a management programme, and measure whether habitat work is producing the result it was meant to.
Biologists & conservation groups
Repeatable census data across a defined area — including overpopulation and browse-pressure work where a real figure matters.
Agricultural & timber operations
Quantify the herd behind crop or seedling damage before making a case for depredation or a change in management.
Related
Looking for one animal, not the herd?
Recovery of a wounded deer or a missing pet is a different flight with a different urgency — flown on call, usually after dark.
Lost Pet & Game Recovery →Ask us how we can help
with your next project
Tell us the acreage and what you are managing for. We will come back with the flight window, the deliverable and the number — usually same day.