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.

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.

I recently moved from Kentucky to Idaho, so instead of focusing on whitetails this hunting season, it’s all about the elk. I harvested my first elk last year, and I’m ready to put number two in the freezer this year.

Hunting elk on public landing in Idaho is definitely different than hunting whitetails on my farm in Kentucky. We aren’t using feeders, minerals and supplements or food plots to bring the elk in, and hunting elk typically requires much more physical effort than hunting whitetails where you have long periods of sitting in tree stands or ground blinds.

In preparation for the upcoming season, I’ve put together 5 tips that will help you have a successful elk hunting season:

Scouting for Elk – Before you can harvest an elk, you have to know where they are. Pre-season scouting can mean the difference between packing out meat or going home to tag soup!

• Use maps to get a lay of the land – I use the Hunt App by onXmaps to research my hunting unit. It identifies each hunting unit, private and public land, roads and trails and more.
• Glassing – A quality pair of binoculars or a spotting scope is a must for glassing. During summer scouting, look for herds of elk in fields in the evening and watch where they’re coming from and where they’re going.
• Look for rubs and game trails – If you find an area that has rubs from several years ago to the most recent season, that’s a good indicator that the area consistently has elk. Game trails provide insight on where elk are coming from and going to, and will likely lead to food, water or bedding areas.

Look for Water – Animals need water. That’s a fact. Find water, and you’ll find animals. By the time fall arrives in the west, water is limited. There isn’t much rain during the summer months, and many of the small ponds and watering holes in the mountains that form from snow melt are dried up.

• Find a watering hole and see what kind of tracks you can identify. The photo below shows two moose drinking from a mountain-top pond in Idaho; this pond is also frequented by elk and mule deer.
• Elk will travel from high in the mountains to lakes and reservoirs at lower elevations, so look for game trails to determine where they’re coming from.
• Look for beaver ponds, as elk and other game will use these too since they will hold water throughout the summer and fall seasons.

Use Game Cameras – Game cameras are useful when trying to pattern elk and other game. Place cameras in high-traffic areas, around watering holes or in bedding areas. Put cameras out early in the season to watch bulls growing their antlers, cows with new calves and identify if there are predators in the area.

 Here are a few things to consider when selecting a game camera:

• Battery life – You most likely won’t be checking cameras frequently, so it’s important to select a camera that has a good battery life. I prefer cameras that take AA batteries; Not only are AA batteries usually cheaper, but they seem to last longer.
• Picture quality – A camera in the 2-6mp range should be sufficient for most people. Higher mega pixels do not necessarily mean better quality.
• Infrared or flash for night-time pictures – Infrared cameras don’t seem to spook animals and are not noticed by humans. Additionally, an infrared flash seems to help preserve battery life.

CAPTION: Image courtesy of @idahotrailcameras, Cassidy Golightly

Prepare Yourself Physically – As I mentioned already, I learned through my personal experience that elk hunting is more physically demanding than hunting whitetails. Elk hunting is spot-and-stalk hunting, rather than a sit-and-wait hunting. Listening for a bull bugle, spotting elk from across a ridge—then going after it. This means you could be hiking up and down steep inclines, stepping over a lot of downed trees, walking through high brush, and hopefully packing out a heavy load of meat. Because of this, it’s important to train yourself and get into shape for the hunt.

To prepare:

• If you’re everyday life doesn’t include much physical activity, start walking, jogging or climbing stairs.
• Spend time in the woods prior to hunting season hiking trails of various distances and inclines. This is a great way to scout!
• Hike to your cameras instead of riding your 4-wheeler.
• Carry a weighted pack to simulate packing meat from the mountains.

Get Your Gear in Order – Prior to season, take inventory of your hunting gear to identify new items you need, what needs to be replaced and what you have that you no longer need.

 The gear you’ll need depends on your hunt—whether you’re going on single day hunts, multi-day backcountry hunts or if you’ll be hunting with a guide/outfitter; it also depends on whether you will be bow hunting or rifle hunting. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation has a helpful checklist available on their website.

Sarah Honadel is an avid outdoorswoman from Kentucky, now living in Idaho, who enjoys huntingelk, deer and  turkey. She is a Team Member at Huntress View and Brand Champion for ReelCamo Girl, two organizations that work to support, encourage and empower women in the outdoors. Follow her on Instagram @waddysarah and @arrowridgecreations.

Trail camera technology has really improved over the years and there are more features than ever, allowing you to customize your trail camera experience to your liking. For someone who is new to hunting or the trail camera world, picking out your first game camera can be somewhat overwhelming, especially if you don’t know what features you need or what the features even do. After someone recently asked me for advice on what they need to look for when purchasing their first camera, I decided to share a few things that I feel are “must-haves”, as well as some bonus features and accessories that may be an asset to you.

Features

I really feel a lot of features on trail cameras are user specific and depend on user preference. I’ll briefly explain the features that I feel are the most important when considering which camera to buy.

Flash Type

The flash types are: White flash, Black flash (Invisible, or No-Glow), and Standard IR (InfraRed / Low-Glow). Tom Rainey of Browning Trail Cameras wrote a really great article for this blog explaining each flash type and their effect on trail camera picture quality: http://btc-omrc.com/nighttime-trail-camera-images-putting-light-on-the-subject/

Basically, the highest quality nighttime photos will be from White Flash cameras, then IR cameras, and then Black Flash cameras, but that’s not to say that the quality of the nighttime images from Black Flash cameras are bad. You just may notice a little more motion blur on them.

So, a few things to consider when choosing the flash type:

Where will you be putting your cameras?

If you are going to be putting them on public land or in an area that is known to have a lot of trespassers, you will probably want to go with a Black Flash camera. Otherwise, one of the previous two flash options may be what you would prefer.

Do you feel a White Flash or Standard IR camera will spook the game you are hoping to get pictures of?

If so, a camera with Black Flash may be best for you. My personal experience with Standard IR and White Flash cameras is I feel the animals get used to them. I haven’t noticed them spooking deer in the years that I have been running trail cameras. Everyone has their own opinion on this and each location may be different, so again, go with your own personal preference here.

Detection Range

The location where you plan on putting your game cameras will help you decide which camera may be best for you in regards to detection range. If you are running trail cameras primarily in the woods or have it set up over pinch points and travel corridors, the detection range can be quite a bit lower. But, if you are watching over larger areas, such as fields, the detection range needs to be a little higher, especially if you aren’t quite sure where the wildlife are traveling.

For example, the Browning Command Ops has a detection range of 55 feet with a 60-foot flash range, which is great. But the Browning Recon Force Extreme has a detection range of 80 feet with a 120-foot flash range, which is quite a bit more. So, you can see how the higher detection range could be quite a bit more beneficial in certain situations.

Trail Camera Accessories

Obviously, SD Cards and batteries are must-have accessories for your trail cameras. But there are a couple other accessories that you may want to look into purchasing for your first trail camera, depending on the location the camera will be in and how often you plan on checking it.

Security Box

As I mentioned above, the location really is a key factor to consider when purchasing your trail camera. The same goes for deciding whether or not you need a trail camera Security Box. A couple things to keep in mind here: Do you expect there to be trespassers, or will the camera be on public land? Also, what types of animals are in your area? Do you have a high bear population? If you answered “Yes” to any of those questions, I recommend getting a Security Box. Browning makes one that fits all of their camera models (excluding the Defender 850). It can also be locked using a standard padlock or a Master Lock Python Cable so your camera stays safe and stays put.

Trail Camera Power Pack

The Trail Camera Power Pack will extend the battery life of your Browning Trail Camera in the field. This is a great option if you don’t plan on checking your trail cameras very often. It holds holds 8 AA batteries in the same easy to use battery tray used in the trail cameras. Other features include a built-in battery tester and a twist lock plug to lock the power adapter to your Browning Trail Camera.

Bonus Trail Camera Features

Here are a few “bonus” features that you may also want to take into consideration when choosing your first trail camera. I personally don’t feel that these are features that you absolutely have to have, but I do feel they will enhance your trail camera experience. Personal preference comes into play here as well. Here are a few of my favorite features on the Browning Trail Cameras:

Viewing Screen

This is an internal viewing screen on some of the Browning Trail Camera models. It’s great for viewing trail camera photos in the field, and it really comes in handy when positioning the camera while you are setting it up.

Timelapse Mode

The Timelapse function allows you to set up your camera in the field, and program it to take pictures automatically at fixed intervals. This feature is helpful when you set a camera up in a new location such as a large field or food plot where you are not sure where the wildlife are entering the field. 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. All Browning Trail Camera models come with this feature, as well as the Timelapse Viewer Plus Software, so you can playback a whole day’s worth of activity in just a few minutes, much like watching a video.

Multi Shot / Rapid Fire Mode

In certain situations, the 8-Shot Rapidfire mode is one of my favorites to use on my Browning Trail Cameras. It takes 8 shots in 2 seconds! I prefer to use this when I have a specific animal that I am targeting that I know will not be in the frame for long. For example, I wanted a Bobcat on this log setup, but I knew it would likely not use this log repeatedly and not stay on it for long, so I put it on Rapid-Fire mode to get as many photos of it as possible and pick my favorites to share. Rapidfire Mode is also great in deer season when you are watching a smaller area, such as pinchpoints and travel corridors, so you don’t miss any deer activity.

Video Mode

This is a really fun trail camera feature. It’s almost like watching the wildlife in person when playing the trail camera videos back! With 1920 X 1080P Full HD, the audio and the clarity in the Browning Trail Camera videos is really amazing. Additional new features for the 2017 model includes Smart IR video, which continues to record video footage while game is moving in front of the camera and SD card management options which allow you to overwrite older images on the SD card if the memory is full.

I hope this article helped you know where to start in shopping for your first trail camera! If you have any other questions that were not listed in this article please feel free to leave a comment below.

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