How many trail cameras you need and why you need to leave them out year round. 

By 2016 Outdoor Life Deer of the Year Award Winner Ryan Aulenbacher

Putting cameras up during the season is great and then when you get one picture in mid-September you get excited. Only problem is you can’t tell if it was a one shot wonder or a resident buck.  There lies your problem. Let’s say it was at 2AM.  Was he going to bedding area or going to a feeding area or?  In my younger years I would just pound that area with activity not really knowing if that was where he was most of the time. This not only didn’t result in getting said buck but I never even saw him with my own eyes.

The goal for me with game cameras is to try and start building that pattern early and get your stands in the woods before the season begins, or at least during early season.  I don’t care how careful you are when it comes to scent control, it’s very hard to keep an area scent free during the season when you are banging around with a tree stand, breaking a sweat, and cutting branches for shooting lanes.  From my years of chasing these one shot wonders I can tell you it’s not a successful strategy.

That’s why the cameras need to be up year round.  I literally leave them up 365 days a year.  With today’s cameras that may be 2 sets of batteries a year and with a Browning Trail Camera that’s only 6 AA batteries at a shot.  That’s less than $5 a year in batteries.  That’s pretty cheap scouting if you ask me.  As a side benefit you also can get a better view on the predation, the number of fawns you have each spring, and an occasional Morel hunter who can’t read No Trespassing signs.

So what is a pattern?  It’s when you are seeing deer come through at some similar time periods within close proximity of days.  Knowing what direction he is going helps as well.  When you start seeing him 2-3 times a week he likely is just out of camera view the other days.  Try and use your best guess on where his bedding and feeding areas are with this information.  If you are getting weekly pictures of him you surely are in “his home.” Hopefully you have an intercept point ready to go.

Once you start keeping your cameras up year-round, you may notice deer moving from their spring pattern to summer pattern and then to their fall pattern when they lose their velvet.  This is also when you should be trying to hone in on a pattern. For example; are the bucks following the river or are they headed into the corn at a certain spot?  Do I have any coyotes on this side of the property?  (Disclaimer: being on the non-coyote side of the farm is like being in the non-chlorinated side of the pool; there is no such thing but I find that like deer, coyotes are more active in certain areas.) I notice that if I start seeing coyotes in one area with my cameras I don’t see many does and fawns in that same area.  On the flip side, I have noticed that bachelor groups in early summer won’t show much of a change due to predator activity.

You need to move your cameras throughout the season as well to help pattern your bucks. Don’t go throwing them up in the middle of a bedding area, but you do need to change where you place them throughout the year to see if the deer are entering and exiting an area in the same or a different spot from the month or year prior.  You need to have fresh data to go off of.

For instance, my buck that was on the cover of Outdoor Life I had on camera in the same area on 2 different cameras every 3-4 days from August until November. The cameras were about 100 yards apart in an area just outside of what I believe was his bedding area.  I set up my stand at an intersecting point trying to get him on the way back in during AM hunts and on the way out during PM hunts.

A few years prior to my deer that was on the cover of Outdoor Life I had shot another good buck.  The following year I left my cameras and stands in the same areas and basically hunted the pattern of a deer I already killed the year prior. It hit me as I sat there late in the season not seeing any mature bucks. “Why am I in this stand? What deer am I hoping to see? I didn’t have any patterns developed…” That’s why you need to try different spots every year with your cameras.  Yes, you have good “areas” year after year on your land but with bow hunting you need to know the right tree not the right area.

So how many cameras do you need?  Well that’s tough to answer in a vacuum.  I think the better question is, where do I need them? I would definitely try and get a camera up where they have the most activity coming in and out of your land near some edges or bottlenecks so you don’t disturb bedded deer.  Until you have a pattern developed I would be vigilant with scent control and check them at least once per week or maybe more during hunting season. I could easily see you having 2-4 cameras out on 40 acres.

Let’s say you have 250 acres.  This is where you can really start to pattern a deer because it may spend the majority of its time on your land.  Going off my experience in rural farming areas of WI where we don’t have massive 400-acre wood lots, more of 80 acres of field and 20 acres of woods and then 20 acres of Marsh etc., I would try to get a camera in each area. So each separate woodlot or cover area would get a camera.  On 400 acres of farm country that might be 10-20 cameras.  I hunt property that is about 200 acres and I have 8 cameras out now (6 black flash/ 2 RED IR).  So that will be around 1 per 25 acres. In doing some research, that is a number you’ll see come up by other hunters and writers as well.

Once you figure out a spot to sit, remember you are in “his” area now and he will notice anything out of place, so don’t put a stand up without taking extreme scent control measures.  I typically wait until right before a rain event to move a stand during hunting season.  I like having the rain wash away any scent I may leave.  You would hate to take all the time to develop a pattern only to change it!

Get your trail cameras out there and keep them up the whole year.  We have so much more technology available today to help us become better hunters if we figure out how to use it correctly.  Good luck!

I’m not a morning person. At all.

I know people say that a lot, but it matters when it hurts what you love to do the most. That trait surely hurts my deer-hunting efforts. You see, I’ve been chasing my beloved whitetails for over 25 years now. I average over 100 stand sits each season — if you break up the morning and afternoon hunts, because often they’re in different locations. But the bulk of that number is generated with afternoon hunts… a large bulk of that number.

I’ve got a trophy room chock-full of heavy antlered Midwest whitetail giants, and I enjoy admiring well over 1,000 inches of bone adorning the mounts which stare at me every night as I unwind watching t.v. All but one of those trophies were killed in the afternoon. So what’s the problem with that, you may ask? I wonder if there could be more. I wonder what that room would look like if I’d been motivated enough over the years to set my alarm earlier? What if I were more motivated? Frankly, it’s hard to imagine what could motivate me more than I already am.

Then it happened… I decided to leave some cameras up this year during the season. I’ll be very candid here: I don’t run a lot of trail cameras once opening day rolls around. Never have. Why? Because I hunt public land, pretty much exclusively. Highly pressured public land – the kind that when you pull up to park, you hope there’s a spot left to squeeze your vehicle into. That probably gives you a good idea of why I don’t like leaving $150-200 prizes out in the woods for the first winner to take home with him when he finds it.

But I took a chance this year. After a couple weeks of leaving them out, I slid one of my SD cards into my laptop and I couldn’t believe my eyes: Wide 8, a deer I’d captured on camera only after dark for three straight years, walked up to a scrape guarded by my Browning Spec Ops HD and began working it at 7:30 a.m.! Talk about motivation!!

Wide 8, a buck that Staggs has watched for three years straight, strolls directly into a scrape at 7:30 on the morning of October 29th:

And that is my point… Yes, I know hunters have long used trail cameras to “inventory” their bucks, even creating special folders for them and sometimes being able to watch them progress over the years as I had done with Wide 8. But I’d truly never thought about using a trail camera for motivation – until now. Now before I slide between the covers and wonder if I should get up tomorrow morning and get in a stand, all I’ve got to do is watch that video. I don’t have to wonder if he ever slips up in the morning, I KNOW he does. And that motivates me.

Greg Staggs is the former back-page columnist for Inside Archery, and his writing regularly appears in such magazines as Outdoor Life and Petersen’s Bowhunting. Staggs loves introducing his two boys to all things outdoors, including fishing, trapping, canoeing and camping, and has been chasing turkeys and big game exclusively with archery equipment for over 20 years.

Just a couple weeks ago I made my first series of mock scrapes for the year and placed my Browning Trail Cameras on all of them using what I call the “30/30 setting”: Video mode set on 30 second clips with 30 sec delay. It didn’t take long before the first mature buck found one in less than 24 hours of being made, and within a couple days they all started to heat up. I noticed one series of the three was showing more activity from a specific deer than the others. I knew right away this was a deer I wanted to target, but how was I going to be able to do so? The October lull was here and everything was happening at night. I knew if I wanted to harvest this deer I would have to do so fast, before love pulled him away.

​I chose to focus on checking that series of three cameras the most frequently, using wind and time of day to my advantage. By having them on the “30/30 setting”, I was able to see direction of travel and study the specific behavior of the deer I was targeting. Once I was able to get a general direction of travel, I used what I refer to as the “leapfrog method”: moving 2-3 cameras in the direction of travel, leapfrogging them as I checked them. This helps me stay on where I had him last while exploring my thoughts with the newly moved camera. I gained a very solid direction of what I thought was his daily routine – deer of a mature age class are very much creatures of habit – but even having a solid route of travel, I feared I was getting too close to his bedroom. I elected to not move in any further and let my Browning cameras continue to do my homework for me.

Over the course of a couple weeks I checked the cameras in a three-day rotation, as long as the wind stayed true to checking them. The pattern was there but since he was still moving after dark I was going to have to get aggressive, yet smart, if I was to win this chess match. I checked the weather on a site I live by called Weather Underground. This site lays it all out in a graph for me. I noticed an upcoming front with precipitation was a few days out. It was calling for rain for almost an entire day, ending the next day mid-morning with a temperature drop, wind drop, and rising barometric pressure. I knew this had to be the time to make my move!

A couple of days went by and the rain set in. I was going to move in and hang a stand under the cover of good wind. The noise from the rain would cover me, and the wet forest floor would make for sneaking in an easy task. I was able to get my stand hung while staying undetected and pulled all the SD cards on my way out. My thoughts were staying true. My trail cameras showed he moved daily until the front hit and didn’t move that night or morning at all. I knew that after the rain he would likely move, as barometric pressure would be rising with a sudden drop in wind. I was going to hunt the following afternoon.

The following day rolled around and the weather stayed true, my information from my cameras were spot on, and I was able to harvest a beautiful mature 8 point.

When targeting scrapes, deer will likely want to freshen them up after precipitation. If you accompany that with a drop in temperature, high barometric pressure and a wind drop, it can often be the ticket to bucks getting on their feet a little sooner. I relied heavily on my Browning Trail Cameras to help me pattern this particular buck. Without being able to further pin down direction of travel I don’t think I would have been able to catch him during legal shooting hours, let alone a full hour before dark.

By John Steinhauer

For 2017, Browning Trail Cameras came up with a new concept in trail cameras: the Defender 850. When they first unveiled this camera at ATA, I knew it was going to be a game changer. The Defender has some unique features and technology that set it apart from the rest and that can take your deer hunting to the next level. Here are 3 features on the Defender 850 trail camera that will allow you to change the way you hunt this season.

1 – Bluetooth and WiFi Connectivity Via the Browning Trail Cameras Mobile App

You can connect to the Defender on your mobile device from about 60 yards away via the new Browning Trail Cameras app. Through the app you can control the camera settings and download images and video straight to your phone or tablet, allowing you to keep your favorite hunting areas undisturbed and free of scent.

I have my Defender’s set up close to a few of my favorite tree stands so I can check the camera while I’m in my stand without actually having to touch the camera and leave my scent in the area where I am expecting the deer to walk out.

2 – Adjustable IR Flash

This feature is also new for 2017 and allows you to control the range of your LED’s on your nighttime images. There are 3 different flash settings – Power Save, Long Range, and Fast Motion – that allow you to maximize the performance of your Browning Trail Cameras, no matter where they are set up.

–Power Save: This is the most economical of the 3 flash modes. The flash goes out to about 70 feet, which is perfect for wooded areas.

–Long Range: The flash goes out to about 120 feet. This is perfect for open areas, such as larger fields or food plots where the game may be a good distance away from the camera.

–Fast Motion: The exposure time is much faster in this mode, allowing you to capture game that are moving faster, while eliminating motion blur. Think fence crossings, trails, pinch-points and travel corridors, etc. This mode will really come in handy when new bucks start showing up on your hunting property during the whitetail rut!

Here’s a link for a YouTube video for more info on this setting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWva5ReMbKo

3 – Capable of Holding Up To 128 GB Micro SD Card

I wanted to point out this feature for 2 reasons:

1) The camera also features 1080P HD video technology, so having the ability to use an SD card with larger storage capacity means that you can leave the camera out in the field on video mode without having to worry about the memory card filling up in between camera checks.

2) If you wanted to set up your Defender 850 in a location that you may not hunt or visit often, once again you can rest assured that most likely your memory card will not be full by the time you make it there to hunt or check the camera. This is perfect for those whose hunting property is a long distance away, or if your favorite hunting location isn’t easily accessible.

Whether I end up getting a deer this season or not, I already feel like I am one step further with my hunting game plan than I was this time last year, and that is due to the unique features on the Browning Defender 850 that allow me to hunt smarter, not harder.

By Andrea Haas

Andrea Haas is a Pro-Staffer from Missouri who enjoys hunting deer, turkeys, and upland birds. She is also the founder of the Huntress View, an organization formed to help strengthen the ever growing community of women hunters

We’re beginning to get some early fall temps and the taste of clean, cool air. The skies are beginning to look a little different and we are both beginning to feel a bit different. We are anticipating…

Having found a new core bedding area via trail camera recon (photos below) we are now closing in on exactly how this section of property functions and we are stoked for the postseason and the chance to move cameras into this area and establish precise buck bedding locations. However, we still have the ENTIRE NY deer season in front of us and we now know that we have a prime buck bedding location nailed down adjacent to an area the local does bed in. As we continue to work on peeling the layers off that scenario we will ramp up our mock scrape game using our cameras to tell the story of these locations. This year we are adding into our equation several rubbing posts with overhead licking branches where we will begin to test the waters of the local big boys and hopefully provide ourselves another late October/early November tool for our arsenal. As all these fellas begin to take on their fall ranges and each personality begins to show we become probably a little too eager as we wait for the right time to make our next card pull, but hey, this stuff is what it’s all about.

Blog originally posted on EverWild.

EverWild is an online journal of the outdoor adventure’s of two friends from New York – Justin Michau and DJ Tosh – who are passionate about the outdoors.

Chances are, either you or someone you know has been affected by childhood cancer. One of my young, distant cousins passed away from cancer recently, as did the son of one of my co-workers. It breaks my heart to see children suffering from cancer, but thankfully St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is there to help treat and cure these children and to help support their families during the treatment process.

Families never receive a bill for the treatment their child receives or for their travel expenses, housing or food. This is made possible, in part, by fundraising events like the St. Jude Heroes event in Poplar Bluff, MO that I attended a couple weekends ago, sponsored by Browning Trail Cameras. This is an annual 2-day event featuring a VIP Party, silent auction and meet-and-greet with outdoor celebrities on Day 1 and a benefit archery shoot and silent auction on Day 2.

This year the VIP Party included dinner & drinks, live and silent auctions, raffles, a meet-and-greet with outdoor celebrities (including Browning Trail Camera team members Don & Kandi Kisky of Whitetail Freaks, Jon & Gina Brunson of Addicted to the Outdoors, and Derek Dirnberger of The Break TV), and live music from Nate Hosie of Headhunters TV. The best part of the VIP Party was meeting a family that had been affected by and overcome cancer, thanks to St. Jude Children’s Hospital, and listening to their story.

During the VIP Party, there was also a celebrity auction. The outdoor celebrities split up into teams of 2 to compete in a rear-steering tricycle race. Guests had the opportunity to bid on each team and the bidder of the winning team won an AR-15. Don Kisky and Jason Bosaw of the Whitetail Freaks took first place and the proceeds went to St. Jude’s!

Here’s a Boomerang video clip of Jon Brunson competing in the race:

Day 2’s events included a 3D archery range, a pop up range & tournament, free youth archery camps, Cornhole/Horseshoes/Dunking booth and a silent auction all day. The outdoor celebrities also attended the archery shoot on Day 2 to interact with the guests and participate in some of the 3D shoots as well.

Jon Brunson chatting with guests at the 3-D Archery Shoot on Day 2.

The greatest thing is that ALL of the proceeds from this event go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and this year the event brought in over $100,000 in donations to St. Jude! We all had so much fun at this event and knowing that it was for such a great cause made it that much better. If you are a hunter, an archer, or if you just have a passion for helping others in need, please plan to attend the St. Jude Heroes event next year in Poplar Bluff, MO and help put an end to childhood cancer!

By Andrea Haas

Andrea Haas is a Pro-Staffer from Missouri who enjoys hunting deer, turkeys, and upland birds. She is also the founder of the Huntress View, an organization formed to help strengthen the ever growing community of women hunters

Bowhunters everywhere are anxiously counting down the days until deer season opens. Although it’s exciting, if you’re a serious hunter there’s a lot that goes on before climbing into the stand. Preparation is the key to success in the hunting world. You do so by taking inventory of your deer, making sure you have the right setup and proper stand placements, and providing adequate food sources. This will help to increase your success rate, not just for that specific year, but for years to come. Through the preparation process, you really gain knowledge and respect for the land that, in return, helps shape you to be the best stewardess of the land you can be. Setting personal goals to increase your success helps to make yourself accountable and focused on land management.

 

For me, preparing for the season at a young age was different than it is for me now. Throughout my years growing up, I would help my dad hang tree stands and prepare for deer season under his wing. It was my chance to observe and learn. I recently moved a couple years ago into a house that had hunting ground that I could hunt and manage as I could. I finally got the chance to try my hand at land management on my own. It was an important goal for me to learn about food plots. I started by taking soil samples and executing how and what I needed to have a successful food plot. This is now an ongoing goal that I am excited to complete every year. As late August approaches, I will be planting a mixture of Triticale, Forage Oats, Winter Peas, Crimson Clover, Chicory, Turnip, and Daikon Radish. This food plot is located in a corner off of a large soybean field, not quite a 1/4 of an acre. It will provide deer with a highly palatable forage source.

Within these food plots I use my Browning Trail Cameras to take inventory of the deer. During early summer, bucks are in full velvet and still in their bachelor groups. By putting out your cameras early, you can watch the bucks progress and see how their antlers develop. Try to learn their patterns for early season hunting and pay attention to how they are using the land. This is a high priority, and yet something I truly enjoy doing. Study these bucks and get to know them. An attractant can help keep your deer coming back for more, while providing them with adequate supplements and minerals. I use Anilogics Mineral Dirt 180 which has minerals like Copper, Zinc, Selenium, and Manganese to help a deer’s immune system. As the velvet starts to shed completely off, each buck will soon start to go his own way and their patterns will quickly change.

 

You know, there are so many different ways to manage your land and provide for your deer. I think by actively being involved in all year prepping, you can tremendously grow and learn to become an even more successful hunter each year. After all the hard work has been put in, it’s time to enjoy time in the stand. It truly makes all your hard work and effort pay off when you harvest a mature buck or healthy doe. Myself, as well as thousands of other hunters, are making it our final goal to stock our freezer with lean, organic venison. Shooting your bow as much as you can prior to deer season will help give you the confidence you will need in the stand. It’s a year-round cycle of preparing, planning and executing, and it never gets old!

 

Kinsey Edmunds is a pro-staffer from Missouri. Being raised on a farm and surrounded by wildlife, her love for the outdoors began at a young age. Kinsey enjoys bowhunting whitetails, turkeys, hogs and gators, just to name a few. She is also a team member of Huntress View, a team dedicated to strengthening the ever-growing community of women hunters.

Planning on using your bow to harvest a turkey this spring? If you’ve ever hunted turkeys before then you know it will be no easy task. Hunting turkeys with a shotgun is often enough to drive a hunter crazy, let alone adding the challenge of a stick and string. Successfully harvesting a turkey with your bow is perhaps one of the hardest, yet most rewarding hunts you will ever be a part of.

Browning Trail Cameras Pro Staff members Don and Dan Pickell have been bowhunting for years and make bagging a gobbler with a bow look like a piece of cake.

Here are a few of their tips for bowhunting turkeys this spring:

1) Scouting

Spend some time in the woods before season starts so you can be as prepared as possible before opening day. Look for roosting sites, turkey feathers & droppings, feeding areas and travel routes. Once you’ve found some turkey sign or what looks like some good locations, it’s time to hang your trail cameras.

2) Trail Cameras

Get your Browning Trail Cameras out now and keep them out throughout turkey season. Trail cameras will help pinpoint the time of day the turkeys are in certain locations so you know when you should target these specific areas while hunting.

When setting up your cameras, keep the location in mind and set them accordingly. For example, you may want to set your camera on Time Lapse mode while watching large fields or new locations where you aren’t sure where the turkeys are entering or leaving. The camera will take images of the entire field, so you will end up capturing game at 200 + yards away, where a conventional game camera would not normally trigger a picture.

3) Setup

Pattern the birds with your trail cameras and set up your ground blinds accordingly. If they aren’t coming into your call it’s usually best to just sit and wait them out; Remember, you’re hunting with a bow, not a shotgun, so run and gun is a lot more difficult. More often than not, your trail cameras will tell you where you need to be. Remember what you learned about their behavior while studying your trail camera photos and stick with that.

4) Decoys

A decoy will often help bring the birds within bow range while keeping their eyes off of you, but we have also had toms skirt our decoys at times. When this happens we usually pull the decoys and set up in a proven spot where we have them patterned with our Browning Trail Cameras and ambush them. It just depends on the bird’s moods.

5) Shot Placement & Recovery

With a shotgun we aim at the bottom of the neck to allow for the pattern to cover both his head and neck. With a bow, we prefer a broadside shot through the wings if possible so an injured bird can’t fly off, making it harder to recover. Whether we use a bow or a shotgun, as soon as a shot is made we go after the bird and get a foot on its head, just in case.

Going into turkey season, it’s best to have a positive outlook and lots of patience! Turkeys are fickle creatures and even having the “perfect setup” is often not enough to harvest a tom. Make sure you’re as prepared as possible ahead of time by scouting with your trail cameras and keeping the above tips in mind. Harvesting a big longbeard with your bow is worth all of the hassle. Stay safe and have fun this turkey season!

By Andrea Haas

Andrea Haas is a Pro-Staffer from Missouri who enjoys hunting deer, turkeys, and upland birds. She is also the founder of the Huntress View, an organization formed to help strengthen the ever growing community of women hunters.