Observations on Trail Cameras:
Once again I find myself here at deer camp and its about time to turn in but I wanted to jot down some thoughts and observation from today.
Let me start off by stating, If you don’t learn something every day you set foot in the woods, your not paying attention and your wasting your time. I learned some very valuable and interesting things today myself.
I have been using trail cameras for a couple years now, both incandescent flash and infra red flash units. The cameras are almost always set at a feeding site which is whole kernel corn that I broadcast feed. I have literally, thousands of photo’s in my files. Let me admit, I love trail cameras and I am hooked on them. When I get home from the woods, the first thing I have to do is review the cards. It’s like opening up Christmas presents each time you click the nest photo. You never know when the next picture is going to be Mr. Big. I even enjoy all the incidental game that shows up on the camera.
This is the first year I have really been setting the cameras right at my stand sites. These are stands I have been hunting for a number of years and I have the deer patterns down to a science. When they start doing something different that I have not seen them do before, I recognize it right off and start wondering why?
Well, I have been seeing the deer do some things I have never seen them do before and the one common factor is the addition of the trail camera at the sites. I have really been racking up the hours in the tree. In the last three weeks I have hunted morning and night just about every day. I was thinking that the extra time in the stand could be the result of some of this behavior but something happened tonight that really got me thinking and the more I thought the more I started putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Some things that I have been seeing were not as they first appeared.
I have a stand, we’ll call it stand “A’, that I added a trail camera to about 3 weeks ago. I ran the camera there for several weeks without seeing a buck, Only a couple does and yearlings and a pile of coons. Well, I needed a camera at another spot, stand “B”, to see what was coming around there and get a feel for whether hunting there might be profitable. I pulled the camera at stand “A” and moved it to stand “B“. After a week of little activity there, I decided to move it back.
This afternoon I hunted stand “A” and set the trail cam back on the same tree. The deer behavior I witnessed today shocked me and while I new something was strange about what the deer did It took a while before it register. When I started thinking back to other odd things I have been seeing, I started putting 2 & 2 together and a lot of things started making a lot of since.
First of all, when I got to the stand I immediately noticed all most all of the corn was missing! Up to this point the deer were only eating maybe 20lbs a week, that’s nothing, I’ve seen them eat a 50lb sack in two nights. Remember, The camera was gone for the last week. Then I saw the deer I was referring to earlier do something incredible. It was past time to get down but I had hung in there as I could still see with my binoculars enough to ID a deer if one got close. I started hearing something coming off in the thick. In a minute I realized I was hearing an approaching deer. It’s real thick around this stand and I literally had to hack out a place to be able to hunt at this spot. The palmettos are over your head. I’m hearing the deer getting closer and closer. Finally, I see a little movement and a shadow come floating into my small clearing. There is a point when it get so dark that you can no longer see a deer’s legs moving and it looks like he is just floating along. The deer starts skirting the edge of the opening. Just before the deer gets to the camera it makes a 90 to the left, right into some head high palmettos. I’m thinking….what the heck was that all about. I’m listening to her push thru the thick when she pops out on my chop trail and continues on down my trail. She made about a 20yd. Detour thru the palmettos when she could have just kept walking along the open edge and hit the head of the chop trail.
On the way back to camp I was thinking about what she did and all of the sudden a light went on in my head…..that deer just skirted my trail camera! The camera had been gone for a week but apparently, she was so offended by it she was still going out of her way not to get in front of it. She never triggered a photo that night and stayed just out of the sensor’s range. Incredible!
That got me thinking about some other unusual behaviors I had been seeing and the conclusions I had drawn about them.
At one of my other stands I have a couple of nubbin bucks that frequent the stand. Not long after I started seeing them I started to notice they would circle the feed site and come in from down wind. I could not believe I was seeing an orphaned, 6 month old deer with little training from mama, circle like this. They would come in from the NW right towards the feed. My camera was set up in the NW corner of the small open area where I broadcast feed. They would come in to within one pine row then turn east down the row until they got to the edge of the thick gallberry bushes on the East edge of the feed site. Then they would turn South into the gallberries and push thru the thick until they were on the SE side of the corn and then turn back to the NW and start feeding on the corn outside of the camera’s range! A 180 deg. Loop just around the outside of the corn and out of the cameras range!
When I started thinking about this I realized that was not the only deer I have been seeing do this exact thing. When a deer circles a spot to scent check it, he circles wide, out about 75-100 yds., maybe more. These deer are just skirting outside the edge of the feed which only covers an area of 25-30 feet. They are already in harms way at this distance so my initial conclusion was not correct. They are skirting the trail camera.
I will post a link to some videos of this behavior when I get them edited for posting.
A couple of weeks ago I reset all my cameras to infra red and I am still getting the same reactions. They will get in front of the camera but they are shy of it and I’m convinced if the feed was not there they would alter their movements around the camera once they learned it was there which is immediately. Some deer show curiosity over the cameras and will get right in the lens but it seems most are unnerved by the presents of the camera.
One of my cameras is a Bushnell Trophy Cam and it’s set to take a 3 shot burst. I got some pictures of a monster in Illinois last year, almost killed him actually but that’s a story for another post. He passed the camera trap 5 times in two weeks. He did not see it the first time he passed as the camera was angled the direction he was walking and it was daylight. All other times he looked right at it, as almost every deer does but about the 4th encounter, the 3 shot series showed him stop, look at the camera, then wheel back to run. He came back again but never in the daylight.
Another interesting thing I have seen is that the deer will eat the corn furtherest away from the camera first! The feed nearest the camera is always the last to get eaten.
I am seeing a lot less daytime deer sightings since I have been setting cameras at my stands. I have shot 5 bucks this year with my bow which is one of my best years but I really put in a lot of stand time to accomplish that. I am seeing bucks but very, very few does. In fact I am not sure I have seen a doe from my stand in my hunting club. Does are frequenting the area at night and it seems like the bucks are crusing thru looking to pick up a hot track. More than half of the bucks I see don’t stop at the corn to eat.
I have also noticed that I see a lot of big bucks at night that never come back. I think this could be attributed to an increased travel range of bucks out looking for does but I cannot rule out the possibility of an issue with the camera being there. I have to admit, I have seen other big bucks multiple times. I will need some more camera time before I can hope to get some fact based answers about all this.
I can say this…. A buck is far more wary than a doe or yearling ever thought about being. Does and yearlings will put up with a lot more human presents and disturbances than a buck ever will. If I am seeing nubbies react negatively I have to believe it is effecting the older bucks also. In my case here in Florida, it is legal to feed deer and that coupled with the increased doe activity might cancel the negative effects of the camera on the bucks. I still have more questions than answers.
I really do not want to stop setting the cameras at my stands. It is so exciting to see a buck at your stand when you are not there and see all the deer that are using there. It is truly amazing. Will I make some adjustments to how I set the cameras? Time will tell.
One thing I am considering is blacking out the flash. I think I will try this at one stand as an experiment. I know it will effect the early morning shots and I will get all blank shots at night but there will be a trigger and I will at least know how much activity was there. Since you can only shoot deer in the daylight, I’m not so sure that the deer that frequent at night are relevant other than this might cause a buck to cruse thru after the activity is over (in the daylight) checking for a hot doe to track down.
I am also going to place a camera along the main trail to the feed station and see how it effects the bucks using this trail. I am sure it will cause a change in their travel pattern.
One thing I know is more information for making decisions is better than less so the additional intel gained by using the cameras is very valuable as well as entertaining.
As I have some more insight and facts about these camera issues I’ll add them to the post.
Best of luck,
Larry Stephens
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