I have had trail cameras both cellular and non for a couple years now. In the past I only had one cell camera and would set that up on hunting land that was far away from me so I would have some insight to the area when I wasn’t there. It was a hilly/steep area and I would use it mostly on small drainages, creek crossings, old timber roads etc. because I just wanted to confirm that there were good deer using the different terrain features. Then I started to narrow in on some of the travel routes more along with feed trees. I had a lot of good pictures of bucks and does at a couple spots and I spent the year before last hunting one spot almost exclusively in attempt to catch the rut and the bucks traveling through there. This particular area was a drainage of three hills where there was a feed tree and also a major crossing. I saw hundreds of deer that year small bucks and does, but I chose not to shoot anything in attempt to wait for a mature deer. Stuff starting firing up around the rut and I got a shot at very nice 8pt chasing a hot doe. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to recover that deer and it really took the wind out of my sales. I wanted to changed things up so I changed to the trad bow and focused on scouting a lot more. My goal for last season was just to find feed trees and kill a deer with my trad bow.
I was always behind the curve on finding where deer were feeding and since we have a long fall and acorns can drop in places all the way up to late November I wanted to hone in on freed trees. There was a great sale on bushnell cameras so i picked up three cell cams and 3 non cell cams. I would put the non cell cameras on unsuspecting parcels that were thick with undergrowth, or swampy, or by a feed tree and I would let them soak. I thought they were good travel route and I wanted to use them there to confirm that. The cell cameras I would also use on new spots that I already scouted and saw deer or feed tree, or travel route where I wanted to narrow down the most traveled path. Pinch points in areas where I already knew where deer were not only gave me a good inventory of the bucks in the area but it also helped me try and understand when they were moving through.
I can only hunt weekends and not even Sunday so some of the areas would be hit or miss, and often I couldn’t hunt them when I really needed to. I killed two bucks off camera intel, and I killed two purely on scouting intel this past season. Cameras are great but when areas dry up and the deer move sometimes you don’t have time to let cameras soak, so it’s boots on the ground and then immediately hunt. Being aggressive has done me more good than harm. Checking areas that were void of sign earlier has yielded areas covered in sign. Cameras that were stale turn out to have deer moving nearby by them out of camera field of view. Scouting and hunting around your cameras can help you paint the rest of the picture. Cameras have helped put in me in the right spot for 2 mature bucks, both of those I didn’t recover but the scouting and cameras got me in the right spots.
Lastly, I have non cellular a soaking over the off-season just for fun. A couple of the spots I have had them in for a long time and know were/are using the areas but I wasn’t able to make it to those area for hunts during the season for one reason or another. My plan will be to pull those cameras and compile that data/info to better paint the picture of hunting that area when the time comes this season. I imagine I will be switching up my cell cameras a fair bit this year as I attempt to find hot oak trees. Cameras are a lot of fun and I enjoy getting pictures of deer even if I’m not hunting a particular area hard.