KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The buck that Mike Blair has nicknamed Sandburr is in trouble.

Little does the big deer know that his habits have been studied for weeks now. The remote hiding place he uses, the escape routes he travels, the places he beds down, the trails he follows to feed — they've all been captured on digital photos

For weeks now, Blair has been spying on that deer in the Red Hills of south-central Kansas with his eye in the woods — a trail camera.

Now that the Kansas archery season opened on Sunday, Blair will enter the woods more confident of success than ever.

"I stumbled onto this buck on a 103-degree day this summer," said Blair, a nationally known wildlife photographer for the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks and an avid bow hunter. "I backed off and put a trail camera near his core area, which is a little canyon way back in a remote area.

"Ever since, I've been getting photos of him. He's definitely huntable. I don't think he knows he's in danger.

"But once the season opens, I plan to hunt him hard."

That buck, which sports a big 12-point typical rack, may have gone unnoticed by Blair a year ago. That's before he began using trail cameras to help with his scouting.

Oh, he was in the woods a lot even then, studying deer and reading their habits so he could get close enough to snap some of his award-winning photography. But the trail cameras have opened up a whole new world.

By strapping them to a tree in key locations — near trails, scrapes, fence crossings and creek crossings — Blair has gotten a fascinating look at the deer woods from a new perspective.

The digital cameras snap photos around the clock automatically when a deer steps in front of it. The shutter is triggered by a sensor that detects both motion and heat.

Each photo includes the time and date the picture was taken, allowing hunters to pattern when deer are using specific areas.

For Blair and many others, that amounts to an exciting new way to scout.

"It's like having an eye in the woods 24-7," Blair said. "These trail cameras have allowed me to see a world I wouldn't otherwise get a look at.

"Being in the woods as much as I am, I thought I had a pretty good idea of how things worked. But I've been amazed at some of the things I've learned through these cameras."

Such as ...

• Blair started using the trail cameras in January of this year. He first set one out near a scrape, the spot a buck paws out on the ground to attract does during mating season.

Traditional thinking is that those areas would attract plenty of activity during November, the peak of the deer rut, but not a lot in winter. But Blair found out otherwise.

• Specific bucks would show up on the same trail day after day. But not always at the same time.

"I was using six cameras this summer," Blair said. "Sometimes, I would saturate an area and put four of them out on entry trails to one 20-acre field, to see which one was being used most heavily.

"Specific deer would get into a routine of using one trail. But they wouldn't always come to feed at the same time of the day."

• There were conditions that did make the deer easy to pattern, though. The biggest one? The drought.

"When it got super dry, the deer would come to water at specific time periods," Blair said. "They would traveling to watering holes at noon and stay until about 1:30, then again at 5 (p.m.) and again at 10 (p.m.)."

• Of particular interest to Blair was the way some big bucks would just disappear.

"I'd have photos of him on a trail for a while, then nothing," he said. "Some of these bucks I never see again.

"What I think happened was that they changed ranges, like you always hear about. They might pick up and move several miles."

• The trail cameras also gave Blair a look at antler development and the way that changed behavior.

"Most of the bucks had lost their velvet and gone to hard horn by the 5th of September," he said. "That's when they became more nocturnal.

"That's when I moved my cameras more back into the timber instead of at the edges of fields. I started getting images of them in the early morning, coming back from feeding and returning to their bedding areas back in the woods."