There is a similar project for rabbit deterrence that might give some helpful ideas on the approach: https://blog.roboflow.com/rabbit-deterrence-system/

Awesome, thanks for the link! The vision portion is very much what I'm imagining for my deer deterrent.

step-by-step tutorial for object tracking with YOLOv5 and ByteTRACK to track players on a football field

This paper (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-57058-3_...) might help and is available on github (https://github.com/nimiq/qr-scanner).