DALLAS — James Kroll has spent 35 years debunking popular misconceptions about America's favorite big game animal — the white-tailed deer. Kroll, a.k.a. Dr. Deer, is a professor of forest wildlife and director of the Institute for White-tailed Deer Management and Research at Stephen F. Austin University.

He's a regular on hunting and deer management seminar tours and also on the North American Whitetail television series, where he delivers concise information about wild deer, ending each segment with a signature phrase "I'm James Kroll and this is my world."

Kroll has helped landowners from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border manage deer. His cutting edge research includes the use of infrared triggered cameras as early as the late 1970s.

Today, thousands of hunters use inexpensive digital cameras (more than 100 models are available) to census deer herds, identify target bucks and track their movements.

For years, Kroll's research assistants have followed deer equipped with telemetry collars. He set up one Louisiana study where the movements of telemetry animals were tracked by satellites and computers around the clock.

Kroll's telemetry work introduced terms like "staging area," "sanctuary" and "sign post" to the whitetail hunter's lexicon. He even coined the term "food plot" because he hated early references to hunting on "oat patches."

Kroll produced one of the first videos to educate hunters on how to age deer by observing body characteristics.

"It's very gratifying to hear modern hunters talk about seeing bucks of a certain age in the field," Kroll said. "In the old days, hunters looked at a deer long enough to identify him as a buck, then they shot him. Today's hunter is much more educated about the deer, and I'm pleased to have had something to do with that."

Sportsmen can follow Kroll's latest study involving a captive deer herd near Stephenville via the Deer Channel (www.deerchannel.com). The high-fenced study area is sprinkled with remote-control cameras that track deer movements. What makes the study unique is that some of the deer are also equipped with cameras that reveal what the deer sees.