- Joined
- Apr 1, 2014
- Messages
- 700
Do camera’s and social media affect your hunting psyche?
Talk about changes over the years. As a bowhunter for over half a century I never thought the day would come when we could get a pictured inventory of what deer and especially bucks are in our hunting area and I really don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. I’m positive it affected my hunting time in a negative fashion in 2017.
While I have about 40 locations prepared in Michigan going into each season, I only hunt about 12 of them based on mast and fruit production, crop rotations, signposts, and other hunting pressure on the same property.
While I rarely use motion cameras in Michigan, when I travel hunt to lightly pressured states during or after our gun season each year I set up cameras at every hunting location and exclusively hunt those locations based on what’s on the cameras. I don’t use them in Michigan because checking them negatively affects deer traffic while in lightly hunted areas they don’t.
This was the first year I put out 2 cameras in non-hunting locations and other than the 3 ½ year old buck I took, there were no other bucks in the areas of interest. How did I know that with only 2 cameras you might ask? Everyone else hunting the public and private properties I have free permission on have cameras out and I try to keep in contact with them to see what they have on camera and of course in today’s social media world the pics are on their cells and they’re happy to show them off as if they killed them. If the other hunters are using them at their locations, I might as well take advantage of it to know what’s in the area.
Of course in the heavily pressured areas I hunt nearly all the pics I’m shown of good bucks are after dark, but that’s because they tend to hunt more open vulnerable areas and typically have their cameras set up over bait or some other form of human activity site.
This past season I had a bordering neighbor that I’d never met before stop on the road as I was changing to go hunting and congratulate me on taking the biggest buck he and his brothers had on their cameras. He had actually just finished pulling all their cameras as they were not going to hunt there anymore that season.
It’s tough to get motivated to get out of bed at 4 am to go bowhunting when there is 10 to 20 cameras in the area and none of them have a buck that you want to shoot on them. I can deal with their after dark pics of big bucks because I hunt more remote and difficult to access areas where those same bucks may move during daylight, but when there’s not even middle of the night pics at bait piles with black out cameras, that’s not a good sign.
Then there’s social media where monster bucks are posted in real time from all over the country and the vast majority of them are bigger than anything that exists in mine and likely your area. That’s also tough to swallow when you know deep down that you hunt every bit as hard as they do, just not in the same states, areas, or types of managed properties that they do.
Just as life is not always fair, hunting is positively and definitely not fair. Fair is when everyone has the same opportunity to excel. Sports is a good example of fair because the participants elevate themselves to the next level based solely on their skill at the game against other competitors while participating on the same field, court, course, rink, or whatever. That is so not the case with whitetail hunting.
So when you’re looking at motion pictures or kills of huge bucks from others that you know hunt in different situations than you do and have more opportunities, congratulate them and keep your inner thoughts to yourself and know that the taking of a good 2 ½ year old buck just may be the best your area has to offer and be happy with it.
I struggle with containing my ego all the time when I see bowhunters get accolades for consistently taking big bucks from lands where I know a good percentage of the bowhunting community could easily do the same given the opportunity. ,
To me bowhunting for mature whitetail bucks has taken a strange direction since the advent of TV shows and videos in the early 90’s, but it is what it is and I have to just suck it up and let it go.
What’s your opinion and please elaborate?
Talk about changes over the years. As a bowhunter for over half a century I never thought the day would come when we could get a pictured inventory of what deer and especially bucks are in our hunting area and I really don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. I’m positive it affected my hunting time in a negative fashion in 2017.
While I have about 40 locations prepared in Michigan going into each season, I only hunt about 12 of them based on mast and fruit production, crop rotations, signposts, and other hunting pressure on the same property.
While I rarely use motion cameras in Michigan, when I travel hunt to lightly pressured states during or after our gun season each year I set up cameras at every hunting location and exclusively hunt those locations based on what’s on the cameras. I don’t use them in Michigan because checking them negatively affects deer traffic while in lightly hunted areas they don’t.
This was the first year I put out 2 cameras in non-hunting locations and other than the 3 ½ year old buck I took, there were no other bucks in the areas of interest. How did I know that with only 2 cameras you might ask? Everyone else hunting the public and private properties I have free permission on have cameras out and I try to keep in contact with them to see what they have on camera and of course in today’s social media world the pics are on their cells and they’re happy to show them off as if they killed them. If the other hunters are using them at their locations, I might as well take advantage of it to know what’s in the area.
Of course in the heavily pressured areas I hunt nearly all the pics I’m shown of good bucks are after dark, but that’s because they tend to hunt more open vulnerable areas and typically have their cameras set up over bait or some other form of human activity site.
This past season I had a bordering neighbor that I’d never met before stop on the road as I was changing to go hunting and congratulate me on taking the biggest buck he and his brothers had on their cameras. He had actually just finished pulling all their cameras as they were not going to hunt there anymore that season.
It’s tough to get motivated to get out of bed at 4 am to go bowhunting when there is 10 to 20 cameras in the area and none of them have a buck that you want to shoot on them. I can deal with their after dark pics of big bucks because I hunt more remote and difficult to access areas where those same bucks may move during daylight, but when there’s not even middle of the night pics at bait piles with black out cameras, that’s not a good sign.
Then there’s social media where monster bucks are posted in real time from all over the country and the vast majority of them are bigger than anything that exists in mine and likely your area. That’s also tough to swallow when you know deep down that you hunt every bit as hard as they do, just not in the same states, areas, or types of managed properties that they do.
Just as life is not always fair, hunting is positively and definitely not fair. Fair is when everyone has the same opportunity to excel. Sports is a good example of fair because the participants elevate themselves to the next level based solely on their skill at the game against other competitors while participating on the same field, court, course, rink, or whatever. That is so not the case with whitetail hunting.
So when you’re looking at motion pictures or kills of huge bucks from others that you know hunt in different situations than you do and have more opportunities, congratulate them and keep your inner thoughts to yourself and know that the taking of a good 2 ½ year old buck just may be the best your area has to offer and be happy with it.
I struggle with containing my ego all the time when I see bowhunters get accolades for consistently taking big bucks from lands where I know a good percentage of the bowhunting community could easily do the same given the opportunity. ,
To me bowhunting for mature whitetail bucks has taken a strange direction since the advent of TV shows and videos in the early 90’s, but it is what it is and I have to just suck it up and let it go.
What’s your opinion and please elaborate?
