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Making the Most Out of Your Summer Trail Camera Setups
Trail cameras are a yearlong effort in monitoring and scouting your deer herd. With turkey season coming to a close, it is time to transition your cameras from turkey scouting locations to focusing on summer trail camera setups.
Many hunters are only concerned with getting big buck pictures and lots of them. Because of that, most use trail cameras in early fall to capture bucks in an effort to use that information to plan October hunts. Big buck pictures are nice and tracking buck movements in August and September are critically important to your early archery hunts; however, there is a lot of information that can be obtained with different trail camera tactics during the summer months.
Besides having a gallery of deer pictures, the true purpose of using game cameras is to remotely collect information on deer throughout the year across multiple areas in order to monitor the herd and plan more successful hunts. If you are only running cameras in the fall, you are missing opportunities to observe different whitetail behaviors across other seasons. A whitetail’s needs during the summer months are much different than other times of the year. For instance, deer will concentrate around food sources that are high in protein and other macronutrients this time of year for two reasons. First, does require food high in protein to aid in fawn rearing and second, bucks need protein and macronutrients for growing antlers. Areas like these are much different than where you will find a buck in the fall, but knowing this and monitoring these spots now with good trail camera placement techniques will provide a wealth of valuable information.
Pros and Cons of Summer Trail Camera Strategies
There are both pros and cons to using trail cameras in the summer. Well thought out trail camera tactics this time of year are just as important as using cameras in the fall. Although there are many advantages and potentially a few more disadvantages, we will focus on the two most important pros and cons of summer trail camera setups.