What are your thoughts and experiences with trail cameras and their impact on tipping off seasoned bucks? What if any precautions do you take while hanging cameras and while revisting them. Obviously different regions and pressures impact a whitetails tolerance or lack there of it. So with that being said, what if any impact do you feel trail cameras and tending to them have on your targeted bucks. This entry will be the first of a four part series I will be covering over the next four months. Please chime in, give us an overall synapses of your region, hunting pressure and how you feel using and tending to trail cameras impacts your local deer herds. Especially those old veteran bucks.
Great topic, Troy. My mindset is always that I assume big bucks will know I’ve been there, but I try to minimize my impact. These days, I’m really only interested in trail cameras that are completely infrared…no flash or visible light. I also want no noise from the camera. I prefer small cameras, and I use either no straps (bracket screwed to tree) or a single, skinny, camouflage bungy. Deer can not only pick off black, horizontal straps, but thieves do a well. I work at doing the best I can to not allow a mature buck to know I’ve been there because if you can succeed with the mature bucks, the other ones will be covered.
Something else I do, depending on location, is I try to set cameras in areas where human presence is more tolerated, and deer are more used to it. I frequently check cameras in some spots from my quad, without ever setting foot on the ground. Scent left from your presence is the first tip-off to a buck that something’s changed.
Overall, deer definitely have different personalities and some tolerate cameras better than others. I set mine based on the most scrutinizing mature buck, and I just consider my efforts “overkill” for the ones that wouldn’t require those extra measures.