My first trailcam hawk and a question
 

Please ignore the time and date as they are wrong (even though I was the one who changed batteries and reset the time stamp yesterday, I am surely not to blame [&:][:-];);))

I just put this trailcam out this year. Decided to take advantage ofa deer carcass. On Saturday, some rabbit hunters found this dead deer along the fenceline with my neighbor. I'm pretty sure it was not there when I was out hunting the last day of muzzleloader (Dec. 30th), although I looked down the fenceline at one point, I did not actually walk this area. There was no snowon the ground soa deer laying there would have blended in some, but I was probably standing only 50 yards from where the deer was found. Dec. 31st we got 12+ inches of snow. There was still snow on the ground on Saturday January 5th, but it was starting to melt and the dead deer was frozen to the ground andpartially covered by snow. It's got a broken front leg and my guess is that it may have been hit by a car as the highway is only maybe 150 yards straight through the standing corn in the picture. Didn't see any gunshot wound, but I didn't roll it over either. When the snow melted it was laying in about 18 inches of water that you can also see in the picture so I drug the carcass to higher ground and attached my camera to the fence. Interesting enough it is a small buck. One antler was shed not too long ago, but the wound was about 50% healed. The other antler was missing too and obviously freshly shed (maybe the impact of the accident?????). It's ears and butt and leg wound have been chewed on a little as is typical.

Here's my question: I'm hoping to get a coyote picture (fingers crossed), but while there are some around, it's not like we are overrun by them. More likely I'll get any of a number of neighborhood farm dogs that run all over the place. LOL! Anyway, I was wondering about taking my knife and slitting open the abdomen to give the smaller scavengers a little help to get to the guts. Usually the turkey vultures would do this, but they have all migrated south for the winter. Sometimes carcasses will lay around for weeks in the winter before something finally gets into them.

Does anyone else ever open up a carcass or should I just leave it lay and let nature take its course?

RE: My first trailcam hawk and a question
 

Had to temporarily suspend the carcass cam experiment due to the camera taking pictures of some unknown people walking the fenceline. Only got thepeople'slegs because of how low and close the camera was set up. Without knowing who they were, I was worried about my camera being stolen. So I took down the camera.

Well, yesterday, I went back to the deer and drug the dang thing a couple hundred yards onto my property (instead of the fenceline with my neighbor) and reset the camera. The deer had hardly been chewed on at all the past week. We may be getting a good bit of snow this week. So if the carcass gets buried in snow and nothing is eating on it, I may pull the camera and do some corn baiting for deer and turkey instead.

BTW, does anyone know what kind of hawk this could be? I have another view that shows the bands on the tail. At first I was thinking Cooper's because they are very common here, but the shape doesn't seem right. How about a red shouldered hawk? Anyone?