Buck Hollow Sporting Goods - click or touch to visit their website Midwest Habitat Company

Early Season Trail Cam Use

The Silence

PMA Member
I have a pretty good bead on several early season bedding areas and exit trails associated with them. The problem is it's really tough to get in close enough to get an observation point.
If season opener is October 1st, have you ever placed trail cams on these exit trails, let's say August 15th, so they can soak for a while as they gather more detailed intel
such as what time, what wind direction and which bucks are actually using that travel corridor this year. Then pull the card a week before season opener so you can go in
at the absolute optimum time based on that new intel.

The same could be asked about scrapes located along those travel corridors. Thanks for any input.
 
Love my cameras but man I dont go anywhere near bedding areas with them. Might want to see if you can use multiple cams, set up a ways away, around the area and see if you can get what you need. Or go whole hog and utilize cell phone cams so you dont have to go check them unless conditions are perfect
 
#Cuddelink solves the problem...remember that beds being used in Aug aren’t necessarily beds being used in October


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I'm with muddy but in that scenario I would get my cams in there now and check them 1 time around September 20th to change batteries and cards. And then I would leave them the rest of the season to gather data during the season to be used the following year. Reason being is right now around me the deer are closer to their fall patterns than they are during August. A lot of August for me is waterways, corn fields and bean fields is where they spend 95 percent of their time. The mid Sept pull would give you a good guess on movement and preferred wind direction
 
I'm with muddy but in that scenario I would get my cams in there now and check them 1 time around September 20th to change batteries and cards. And then I would leave them the rest of the season to gather data during the season to be used the following year. ...

Agree. ^^ Quite by accident, I forgot where I had put a cam once and didn't remember where it was until the following spring. So while I didn't intentionally let it "soak" for 6 months, I accomplished the same thing via forgetfulness. Nevertheless, when I did review that card ultimately I was able to learn quite a bit about a nice buck that seemed to only frequent one area of our farm. To the best of our knowledge, we only got one pic of that buck elsewhere on our farm the whole previous fall. So we thought he was a "traveler" and didn't pay a lot of attention to making a plan to bag him until I saw the previously forgotten card and realized he was there quite frequently, just not in spots that we normally hunt.

So I refined my surveillance the following fall and ultimately had him very well dialed in...so well that I targeted him last fall and pretty much had him read the script and show up on time on evening as I awaited him. I should have bagged him, but I kept thinking he was going to come closer still and never took a shot. I had him at 26 yards in the open and should have shot him there...oh well. While my "closing instincts" were off that night and he lived on, my surveillance and analysis leading up to that were spot on. The genesis of the whole scenario was the "lost" cam, later found, that provided a lot of valuable insight into that buck's patterns.
 
Top Bottom