Surprisingly, as much of a trail-camera user as I am, I've never used a trail-cam as a scouting tool. All of my trail-cam use is about running season-long photo censuses. That is an important fact, because often I have to keep the trial-cameras strategically spread across a property, even keeping some in low odds locations just to make sure I don't miss a buck using just one section of the property. This requirement often precludes my opportunity to "chase" a buck's travel pattern. Even if I'm curious as to where a buck goes after he leaves a camera location where I'm getting his picture frequently, I often can't spare an extra camera to place one close by. I have to keep the cameras spread out to cover the whole property adequately.
I glean some semblance of census, albeit limited, by having cameras set up to monitor buck activity. While my focus is honing in on specific bucks, I'd guess our criteria for camera placement is probably the same. My locations are food plots, scrapes, water holes, trails in between, and pinch points. Most of my mock scrapes are in a pinch point or hub of travel.
Remember those connect the dots worksheets we used to do in grade school? That's exactly how I chart unique buck movement with cams. When a particular buck is on the property I generally don't only get him on one cam. He'll be on multiple cams. By using the timestamp I can draw a line from cam to cam to see his exact travel path and how long it takes. If he hits the same spots in the same order most times he's on the property, then I have learned his preferred tendencies. And that is golden. Furthermore, if I notice a time lapse in the middle of his travel, such as I catch him at 8am in a plot, 830am a couple hundred yards away at a scrape, then he's at another plot in the same line but at 4pm, then I know he bedded down. Not only do I know he bedded but I know roughly where. And if this happens with relative frequency, especially in consecutive years, I've got him by the balls.
That's one example of how I use the trail cams. It takes a lot of cams per acreage and it's almost never that I figure a buck out inside a single season, unless he's a complete homebody. That does sometimes happens. Other times a buck might be completely random with the only pattern being that he can't be patterned. But most bucks fall in the middle of the spectrum with having some idiosyncrasy that repeatably and predictably shows up. I suspect whatever lessons he learned that allowed him to get old also make him vulnerable because it dictates how he behaves, and once I figure out what that unique behavior is I can begin planning a way to exploit it. More often than not the buck makes a fool of me, but often enough I win.
Are you saving high resolution video of everything that walks by your camera and keeping it forever?
