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.