Ani-Logics Outdoors

With hunting season quickly approaching, antler growth is nearing completion and it’s time to gear up for a trail camera survey of the local deer herd. These surveys can give you an idea of your adult sex ratio, fawn recruitment, and male age structure. Here are some tips to maximize the effectiveness of the inventory. The information gained from a survey can be crucial to helping you determine what bucks you will be pursuing this fall.

• Use feed or an attractant if legal. The goal of a camera survey is to get a representative picture of the deer using your hunting area. Using feed or attractant will get the deer exactly where you want them, and they should be relatively motionless which increases picture quality. If you cannot legally use feed or an attractant, then concentrate your efforts where deer are likely to travel such as the border of a food plot, a creek or fence crossing, or at the edge of a watering hole.
• Use an appropriate number of cameras. There are many different habitats across the range of the white-tailed deer, so putting the standard 1 camera per 100 acres may not be enough, and in other cases it’s too many. If your habitat consists of heavily wooded cover in the Eastern US, you may want to use more like 1 camera for every 30-60 acres. If you are in the prairie region of the Western US, then you may be better with one camera per 150 acres.
• Set your photo delay accordingly. If you like to see every possible angle on each deer as it comes in, and have a bunch of free time to look through pictures then it makes sense to set your photo delay very short (30 seconds or less). If you are like me, and can’t sit around clicking through thousands of pictures of the same deer, then set your photo delay to 5 minutes. With a 5 minute delay, over the course of two weeks you should get at least 5 pictures of a buck, and the longer you run the survey, the better your chances of getting more pictures.
• Test your batteries. Most cameras have a battery status symbol, but for whatever reason, they are not very reliable. I can’t remember how many times I have set up a camera using old batteries that appeared to have full battery life and when I come back to check it in two weeks the batteries were dead. I have now gotten into the habit of testing all batteries before I put them into the camera, because it only takes one completely dead battery to lose function on most trail cameras. I use a ZTS Mini Multi-Battery tester which functions quite well.
• Be careful about double counting bucks. When I was in graduate school at Auburn University, I taught a lab on techniques for wildlife management. In that class, students had to conduct a herd survey and count the number of unique bucks visiting a camera site. I would say that 60% of the class double counted at least one buck. The main mistake I noticed when asking why students classified these deer as being “unique” to the site is they counted the number of points showing and since it was different than a previous picture, they concluded it was a different buck. Just remember that not every picture shows all the points a deer has. Most of the time the end of the main beam will cover up a small point in front of it, or a point is stacked so it only shows when viewed from another angle.