Ep. 1052: Foundations – The Evolution of Trail Cameras and How Hunters Still Use Them Wrong

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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.

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Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is a look back on what trail cameras used to be, and I’ll look at what they are now and how you can really use them to figure out deer and become a better hunter. The forward march of technology never ends for us, and it’s easy to look at it like it’s a negative, and it sure can be. But it’s also nice to turn on the lights of an air conditioned house and sit down to stream content that tickles your specific fancy. It’s also nice to know that if you catch the flu, you can take some over the counter medicine and not from it, you know, like our ancestors did. Technology can be good for us, and this goes for stuff we use while trying to shoot rabbits with antlers, like trail cameras. I mean, it’s hard to find a better example of the evolution of technology in the hunting space than trail cameras, which is what I’m going to talk about right now. When I think about my childhood, which happened way back in the nineteen eighties, I think about sitting down to watch Saturday morning cartoons and microwaving a corn dog for breakfast, which I probably washed down with a glass of kool aid. I think about the time when my neighborhood buddies and I walked into the Gully, which was a wooded ravine in town that if you followed it far enough, would take you to a culvert beneath Highway fifty two, and if you kept going, would eventually lead to Mill Creek, or as we called it, the Creek. We also had the river, which was the Root River. Well. In this particular adventure, we met up with a stray dog that hung out with us, and we went to the creek to just around. I don’t remember what we did exactly, but I remember it wasn’t all that warm, and I remember going under a barbere a fence that I poked my arm with pretty good. I remember thinking that my mom would kill me if she knew that I was hanging out with a random dog and that I had bloodied myself up on a barbere fence. Well, that part of the creek was probably about two or three miles from my house. Now, as you can imagine, my parents had no idea me and my buddies were there, and they wouldn’t have had a good idea of where to start looking for me, even if they had wanted to find me. And I know it’s cliched, and I don’t want to get into it, but when I look at my childhood and then the childhood of my kids, they couldn’t be further apart. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. It’s just reality and will probably always be so when it comes to parents and their kids. That time of my life was part Lord of the Flies, part total freedom, and part torture because we were left to our own devices in kids or assholes, or at least they were then. And I’d guess if you sat down with some elementary school teachers today, they’d say that hasn’t entirely gone away. While I was devouring process food and avoiding even the light at supervision from adults. Other things were happening things in the hunting world, one of which was the advent of the first commercial trail camera from a company called trail Master. This new product category didn’t come out of thin air. In the late seventies and early eighties, some hunters, probably hunters who were engineers by trade, started building tripware cameras that consisted of a string that you’d tie across the deer trail that activated a thirty five millimeter camera when it was tripped. These systems, as you can probably guess, weren’t the most waterproof or immune to elements. They were heavy, they’re prone to false triggers, and they were expensive. They didn’t do much for hunting success overall, but they did prove the concept that remote wildlife photography was possible. Those kinds of ideas and those kinds of experiments generally crossed the radar of enough folks until one of them sees the commercial possibility and sets out to do something about it. And that’s what trail Master did with their first models that were built in big metal housings, you know, fitted with actual real thirty five millimeters cameras, and you know that utilized a huge battery pack and had a mechanical shutter activation. They retailed for anywhere from four hundred and fifty to about seven hundred bucks, which when you adjusted for inflation today, that’s out to around eleven hundred to seventeen hundred buckaroos. That’s no small investment for something that really didn’t work very well, but was the loan product in a whole new category. The drawbacks of those cameras and the next several models to hit the market were many, including the fact that they were only good for daytime photos. But the main drawback was that with actual film, you only had either twenty four or thirty six chances to get your pictures. That’s all roll of film could hold, and if you had grass blowing in the breeze in front of your camera, you might fill that sucker up in an afternoon. Now today, a whole bunch of false triggers is an annoyance, but you can solve for it pretty quickly, and it wouldn’t keep you from also getting pictures of d year they walked by. But back then, once that role was full, you had to go into the woods to retrieve it, then take it into a store to actually have your film processed. It might have taken a couple of days or longer, and then you got a paper packet with your printed pictures in it, and you’d flip through them eagerly to realize that you didn’t get a single picture of a deer. Plus you had to pay for the film development with every single role. Now fast forward to the mid nineties, by time when a lot of us could be found dying in a field somewhere from alcohol poisoning on a random Friday or Saturday night, and Camtracker came out with the next wave of trail cameras, which retailed for about three hundred to five hundred bucks. These were still built with thirty five millimeter cameras inside of them, but they had pr detection, flash photography, and could handle weather better. They also offered some improved battery life, but they still relied on film, which was by far the worst part of the whole deal. It was expensive and so limiting. It wouldn’t be until the early two thousands that multiple companies would develop the first wave of digital cameras. These cameras ditched the thirty five millimeter headache and functioned off of memory card storage. This meant that you could now capture hundreds and eventually thousands of photos and wouldn’t have to wait for days to see what you had captured. This was a huge leap in the evolution of trail cameras and allowed for all kinds of advancements, you know, advancements like multiple photos per triggering, event sensitivity adjustment, LCD viewing screens that were just built right in, and a host to other benefits. But they still used white flash though, which spooked the crap out of the deer, as you can imagine. But that wasn’t meant to be a forever thing, and soon infrared led lights allowed cameras to capture nighttime movement without blowing out every deer that walked by. Along the way, better battery life became standard, temperature and moonface stamps became standard, higher megapixel sensors that allowed for better resolution became standard, and the price started to come down into one hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars range from about twenty ten on. Camera manufacturers figured out how to include video options, audio, faster trigger speeds, better performance in low light, and a bunch of other valuable stuff. Then along came sell cameras, which have been the biggest leap in technology, probably since the jump from thirty five millimeter to digital. And at first these cameras were not cheap. They went for about four hundred to six hundred bucks a pop, but the benefit was undeniable. Not having to go into the woods to figure out who walked through all your spots absolutely changed the whole game, and that category of cameras has come to dominate the market. This is due to obvious reasons, but one fun fact I found was that the first cameras to hit the market took on average about three to five seconds from triggering event to taking an actual picture. As soon as I read that, I remembered how often we used to get pictures of deerbuts most cameras will go from trigger to capture in about a fifth of a second. That is a huge advancement and one that speaks to the widespread adoption of the latest and greatest. Now, don’t get me wrong, you can still buy dumb cameras that use SD cards, but it’s getting harder by the year. It’s getting harder by the year to find any hunters who don’t use cameras at all as well. Even the traditional deer camp rifle hunter, who is the epitome of the weekend warrior, uses sell cameras. Why wouldn’t they. It’s fun to get pictures of deer, to build a little stoke before the opener, and to just get a glimpse into the world of white tails without having to be there with them, which almost always affects what they do to some extent. But trail cameras are tools, and we all know that tools can be used wrong, or at least not to their full potential. And even saying that, I realize that it’s hard to make the argument that most people use their cameras wrong if the cameras are doing what they’re supposed to, which is my first point that I want to make. What do you want to learn with your cameras? I know I talk about this all the time, but it’s so important. I don’t think we acknowledge this enough because it feels like putting a few cameras out and getting pictures is just the goal, and it’s a very achievable goal for pretty much all of us. If that’s as far as you want to take it, great, But there’s a lot more that can be done. I can look at the desk in my office and see a couple of new edge fours from Moultrie that I’m going to put in the woods, And I can run down the list of things that these cameras can do, which is a lot. I won’t utilize them to their full potential, I’m sure, but what I can do with them is more than just get some photos of deer. In fact, I pretty much run all of my cameras on video mode. Now I learn more from a twenty second clip of a buck working a scrape than I do have an image of a buck on a scrape. It’s honestly that simple in some ways, and I’ll explain it simply. When I started running cameras on video mode on scrapes, I realized that every single deer that visited them uses the licking branch. All of the bucks, and all of the does all of them, but most of them didn’t pop up the soil and take a leak in it. Some did, but many didn’t, but all of them use the licking branch. So if I’m out hunting and I find a scrape but it doesn’t have a clear licking branch on it. I’m going to pass. Simple stuff like that can be learned through trail camera usage and it will help you hunt better. Years ago I hunted blacktails in California with a fellow who ran a lot of trail cameras, and in the frame of every one he’d hang a small strip of flagging tape so that it was clearly visible. His goal was to not only get images of blacktails and start to pattern them, but to pin down exactly what win the deer used to go through a spot, which is about as actionable of intel as you’re going to get. Again, it’s great to get picks or videos of a buck going by, but knowing that he only shows up when the wind is out of the west is information on steroids. Now you have a huge piece of the puzzle that can take you from digital scouting to actually putting together a plan to hunt him when he’s most likely to show up. This is one of my favorite things about trail cameras. Honestly, not only do they show me how to better hunt a spot given how frequently deer come through and what they do to get there and leave, but also how they check my work. What I mean by that is that Some of my most active cameras have been in spots that I just couldn’t seem to hunt correctly. This happened last year in Nebraska, and while I really don’t know what we were doing wrong on this amazing pinch point I found, I know that we were definitely doing something wrong. The camera there showed me tons of movement. I had an access plan and a blind setup really brushed in, but no matter what we did, we couldn’t see deer when we hunted. It had something wrong, and I don’t know what it is, but I know that it’s real. I didn’t get a chance to try to reverse engineer that situation, but the first thing I would have done is leave that camera where it was and start to back out of that spot to hunt deer. Going to it from a distance, being one hundred yards away and not right on the pinch point means that some of the deer, if they did show up, you know we’re going to be out of play. But at least I’d learn whether my presence right there was the problem. The other option would have been to approach my original setup from the opposite direction, which I thought would kill the action. But since I killed the action with my best plan. Maybe it was nothing more than me reading the whole scene wrong. Either way, that camera showed me that deer loved that spot, but not when a hunter was there. I don’t know how to get more valuable info than that out of any other technology that’s legal in the woods. That’s a huge deal, and it’s somewhat applicable to most hunters in their situations. I would guess attention to not only what your cameras show you with the deer when you’re not there, but for sure what the deer do when you are there. There will be a difference almost always. How severe that difference is matters a lot. You can also use cameras to learn where the deer go when they don’t do what you expect them to. I think this is one of the most underrated use cases for trail cameras. But think about this. You put a camera in your food plot or on a field edge, and then you hunt the biggest buck on the block and he doesn’t show, or he does but you don’t kill him. Eventually that deer is not going to show at all, and your pictures show he’s coming in at midnight instead, you know of a half hour before dark. Is he truly nocturnal or is he just avoiding the hunting pressure in that spot you know, where it’s been most concentrated. My experience with a lot of deer over a long timeline is that they mostly aren’t nocturnal, but they are very good at not going to the places we often hunt. So you can use a camera in this situation to confirm your suspicions. You know that he’s nocturnal, you know, because you’re not actually looking for him other than on that spot. Or you can use them to get into the cover and see if he’s actually just moving where he feels safer. This leads to another thing that a lot of hunters do with camera intel that hurts them, which I’ll frame up as simply as possible. If I go hang and bang hunt somewhere, private, public, whatever, and I see a buck doing something, I will almost always try to get on that movement as soon as I can, usually the next day. And the reason is simple. If a buck walks along a ridge today, I munching on acorns, my highest odds of catching him do that again, or another buck doing that same thing are as soon as I can possibly set up for it, but with a camera we often don’t trust one off intel a whole lot. We get picks of a buck moving through a spot shooting hours, and we wait to see if he’ll do it consistently. This is often the ca of death in all parts of the seasons that aren’t the rut. It might be due to a cold front that’s going to pass, or a tree dropping the best acorn, some er, or whatever. But a deer that shows you he’s killable right now is a deer that won’t probably be more killable in five days, and will often be less likely to make those same movements In person observation makes this believable, but trail cameras convince us we need to wait for a bigger pattern to emerge for we try to hunt around it. But a lot of what deer do they do in short windows of activity and then they switch. This is rarely talked about, but I kind of believe it to be true. Most prey animals have an innate sense of not making themselves overly predictable. Look, I know there are plenty of exceptions to this, but if you hunt where there is some pressure from other hunters or from four legged predators. Deer aren’t guaranteed to follow the same routine for weeks on end. If they show you something, now, try to use it. Trail cameras can give you that and a hell of a lot more. Consider that as you get into your scouting season and start getting those fun little dopeamine hits. When your camera sends an alert that you have new images that are ready to be viewed, do that and come back next week because I’m going to talk about deer populations and how they fluctuate and why understanding what that means in your world can help you build a better plan to kill a buck, no matter whether you hunt in a place with one hundred deer per square mile or ten. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening. If you want more content, whitetail content, squirrel hunting content, vision content, whatever, go to the medeater dot com. We got new articles. We’re covering all kinds of news issues in the outdoors, new films, new podcasts, you name it. It’s all there. Go check it out at the mediat dot com and thank you once again. For your support,