For most, the off-season is here. Hunters are scouting, pulling trail cameras, and planning their next Reconyx deployments. However, before doing so, it’s crucial to conduct proper deer scouting to determine the right trail camera placement. It’s even more important for small property hunting, because you have fewer acres to work with. Here’s how to go about maximizing trail camera efficiency on small hunting properties.
Forget the Camera-Per-Acreage Concept
Many experts and leaders claim hunters should post so many cameras per a certain number of acres. They might toss around 10 cameras per 100 acres, or some other arbitrary ratio. These numbers are disingenuous, as no one can determine proper coverage without seeing and knowing the property.
Therefore, every property is different. Five cameras might adequately cover one 100-acre parcel, whereas 20 might be needed to cover another 100-acre farm. That said, why the variance?
Several factors influence adequate coverage, and why properties vary. Examples include access direction, access quality, bedding vs. food acreages, number of funnels and pinch points, and more. Essentially, property layout impacts where cameras should go, and how many are needed.
Additionally, cellular coverage plays a role, too. Tre Kerns, a Whitetail Properties land specialist in West Virginia, oftentimes deals with areas that do not have cell service. At least, not enough to produce reliable cellular trail camera performance. Thus, it might require a combination of cellular and traditional cameras, which adds another layer of complexity.
Chart the Property Trail Network
Those who plan to deploy trail cameras must walk and learn the property to do so. During the off-season, or upon receiving access to the land, walk the entirety of it. Before posting a trail camera, find whitetail bedding areas, food sources, water sources, and travel routes. Chart these on maps to visualize how deer use and maneuver the property.
Essentially, don’t use trail cameras to learn a property. Your feet and eyes accomplish that. Instead, once you see and get a feel for the land, use trail cameras for inventorying the herd and patterning target bucks. Know your property before deploying trail cameras.
“This means everything,” Kerns said. “There are days I put boots on the ground. I might put some cameras in a backpack and throw these up while scouting. But that boots-on-the-ground timeframe is during the off-season. (From the first of the year through springtime.)
“There are two folds to my scouting,” Kerns continued. “At the first of the year, when all of the leaves are off, I can see where deer have been over the past few months (for fall and winter hunting). Then, I’ll go in and determine where they’re likely bedding in the summer near food (for early season hunting).”
Think About Access Quality and Other Impacts
As noted above, access quality matters. This impacts how you hunt a property. However, far too many hunters and land managers forget its impact on trail camera use.
“One of the key things that comes to mind is access to the areas you can hunt,” Kerns said. “Don’t approach or walk through areas you don’t want to disturb. It doesn’t benefit me to deploy a trail camera if I’m bumping all of the deer out of that area. I run as many cameras as possible. But my access must be good to check and maintain those.”
“From my experience, access is equally as important when posting trail cameras as when hunting,” said Jimmy Giarraputo, a Whitetail Properties land specialist in Virginia.
He stresses the importance of cellular trail cameras, and how these can remove some of the pressure of checking traditional SD-style cameras.
Deploying cell cams with long-term battery life solutions allows you to be more aggressive, too. It permits hunters to deploy these in more sensitive locations, such as the fringes of bedding and staging areas. “This helps you to capture more activity in those transition zones,” Giarraputo said.
In contrast, he stresses the importance of treating SD-style cameras just as a treestand location when hunting. Therefore, place these in spots you can reach without spooking deer. Monitor wind direction when checking cams. Only check them when conditions and timing minimize risks of deer being on their feet, etc. Of course, don’t check them too often, either. Perhaps check them only when you hunt that particular stand location or area.
Overall, it’s important to blend with the environment. For example, park the truck closer to where other vehicles typically park. Use entry routes that are already closer to human activity. Additionally, place cameras in a manner that help them blend. Examples include smaller camera bodies, hanging cameras higher (and angling them downward), etc.
Focus on High-Traffic Locations
Funnels and pinch-points are the obvious areas of increased trail camera effectiveness. These are areas where deer activity condenses into tighter areas, which are perfect for trail cameras.
“You’ll only find the best trail camera spots by getting in there and looking around,” Giarraputo said. “Make sure you look for sign and know when that sign came from.”
For example, search for rubs and scrapes, but understand much of that sign was likely created in October and November. “Know when that sign occurred, and how that plays into your hunt plans, without misreading it,” Giarraputo said.
Focus on food sources, water sources, and travel routes as the big categories. (Of course, edges of bedding areas are great, too.) That said, drilling down, benches, edge habitat, inside field corners, ridge lines, leeward ridges, staging areas, and other areas, are examples of more focused areas.
Giarraputo says that, with experience, you start to understand the flow of the property, and how deer use it. In real time, you can walk the property, read the sign, and visualize how deer are maneuvering it. Within short order, you can locate bedding areas, food sources, water sources, and travel routes between these, and more. Then, deciding where to deploy trail cameras is quite simple.
“Find the edges and feel the flow,” Giarraputo said. “For example, on our farm, down by the creek, during summer, you can hardly see 15 yards. But there’s a faint angle from the creek crossing to the pines. It’s hardly a trail, but we put up a camera, and some of the biggest bucks we’ve seen were using that regularly.”
Consider Seasonal Factors
Seasonal factors influence trail camera placement, too. Of course, deer exist on patterns. Generally, these patterns are seasonal and vary depending on the time of year. These patterns exist on long-, mid-, or short-term timeframes.
“It’s a mixture of putting in the time, finding key areas, and learning the function of the land you’re on,” Giarraputo said. “Get a sense and implement some trial and error as well.”
Therefore, understand that some spots are ideal locations for early season, pre-rut, rut, and/or late season timeframes. The type of bedding cover, food sources, as well as volume of hunting pressure, influences where deer live, and when they do (and don’t) live there.
Make Trail Camera Spots (and Stand Locations) More Attractive
Hunters can implement certain strategies to sweeten the pot, so to speak. After finding good areas, consider creating hotspots within these good areas. This further enhances the property and makes it even more attractive to deer.
Of course, this only applies to private land hunters who own the land or have permission to make habitat-centric improvements. Examples include hinge-cutting low-value trees to improve bedding cover, planting food plots, etc.
Food Plots: Planting food plots provides additional food sources. Using food plot shapes that funnel deer through narrow windows, provides excellent trail cam locations. Shapes with vertexes that make great camera locations include T, U, V, L, J, hourglass, turkey foot, and more.
Attractants: Where legal, attractants provide immediate, short-term benefits for trail cameras. For example, dumping a small bag of deer attractant in front of a camera centers deer in the middle of the frame.
Bait Stations: The larger, more enduring version of using attractants is creating bait stations. Again, where legal, perhaps that’s deployment of a Banks feeder. Generally, most feed corn and/or protein pellets. Posting cameras over these can yield excellent trail camera results.
Mineral Licks: Those who don’t use attractants or feed might still implement mineral. Oftentimes, hunters can feed mineral in Banks feeders, even where it’s illegal to feed corn and other attractants.
Scent Lures: Finally, where permitted by state wildlife agencies, consider using scent lures in front of trail cameras. Or create mock scrapes, jump-start these with scent lures, and allow scrape adoption by the local herd to keep it going.
Ensure Optimized Setup
Generally, smaller properties have fewer trail cameras. Thus, it’s important to ensure the effectiveness of each camera deployed. Camera malfunctions, and user error, hinder valuable time and effort.
Giarraputo says it takes time to learn new cameras. There are learning curves involved. That said, it’s important to learn cameras before deploying them. Learn the settings and interface of the camera before taking it afield. With cellular cameras, understand how to change settings via the app, or camera itself, prior to posting cams.
Camera Direction: Choose the right tree to hang the camera. Point it in the proper direction to capture the most movement.
Camera Height: Ensure the camera height is good. Too high and deer won’t trigger the sensor. Too low and you clip deer off at the head, neck, shoulders, etc. The lay of the land can impact this.
Camera Angle: Tilt the camera up, down, and side to side as needed to frame the shot. Improper angle can lead to poor photos at best and missed deer at worst. Furthermore, angle cameras not perpendicular to trails, but at 45-degree angles, to provide more time to capture deer movement.
Camera Modes and Settings: Choose between available modes, such as photo vs. video, single vs. burst vs. timelapse, etc. Oftentimes, the situation influences the best mode selection. For example, on deer trails, video is better than photo mode, and burst is better than single shot, when bucks are running during the rut. In contrast, in larger fields and food plots, the single shot trigger plus timelapse combo might be best.
Giarraputo likes cameras to take a photo and video directly after that. “I’ve had numerous occasions where you’ll have a doe on camera, and if the video hadn’t come in next, you’d never gotten a photo or video of the buck behind her,” he said. “Then, when you play the video, here he comes walking into the frame.”
Other settings, such as recovery time, should vary based on circumstances. Choose the best settings for the specific situation at hand. Factors include time of year, current deer behaviors, terrain- and topography-based influencers, and more.
Camera Battery Life: Finally, think about battery life. In almost every instance, it’s best to pair cellular trail cameras with external battery sources. Choose a good battery box, solar panel, or combination of the two to increase battery life. This is especially important for trail cameras in more sensitive areas.
To that point, you don’t want cameras in sensitive locations — such as bedding areas fringes — to die. Then, you’re walking in to change batteries and blowing deer out of the bedding area. That won’t work.
“Once you have a sense of your cameras, it’s about battery life,” Giarraputo said. “This is one of the bigger hurdles. Maybe that means not keeping cams in video mode all of the time, because that paired with the cellular service aspect, can make them die quickly. Balancing all of this can be a challenge.”
Analyzing Key Details of Trail Camera Photos
Once trail camera photos and videos start rolling in, it’s crucial to analyze key details of each trigger. Glean as much intel as possible from each capture. For example, study direction of travel in relation to timestamps to gauge where deer are bedding, feeding, and traveling in-between. Furthermore, analyze the wind direction and other weather factors for timestamps associated with daylight target buck sightings. This can reveal what wind directions a buck prefers when bedding, feeding, or traveling through certain areas.
