Back in 2020, I spent some time in Michigan with Mark Kenyon filming our Back 40 series. At one point during a mid-summer stand hanging mission, he decided to check a few trail cameras. I watched as he swapped out SD cards, and then doused each camera with scent-eliminating spray.
At the time I thought he was being just a bit too neurotic. Now, I’m not so sure.
As trail cameras become more and more ubiquitous across the whitetail sphere, it seems like deer are getting wise to them. This is highly situational, as all deer hunting is, but some places I hunt and scout seem to have resident populations of whitetails that do not like cameras at all. In other areas, they couldn’t care less.
It reminds me of the early days of hunting turkeys out of hub-style blinds. While some gobblers will accept a blind the moment it’s set up in the middle of a wide open pasture, a lot of them will shy off, especially if they live on pressured ground. That wasn’t the case when hub-style blinds hit the scene, but even the pea-brained turkey has enough mental horsepower to associate blinds with some level of danger.
I believe some deer have the same reaction to cameras.
When I first started hunting northern Wisconsin for whitetails, my biggest challenge was just finding them. Sparse populations in the big woods can be tough, and one way to shorten the learning curve is to deploy trail cameras.
On properties where I can, I do just that. But in the last five years or so, I’ve seen a lot of deer look directly at my cameras and then bolt. At first, I thought this was just a cautious deer thing. When you live where predators come in the forms of black bears, wolves, coyotes, bobcats, and humans, wariness is a necessity.
But then I started to notice something else. On properties I hunt in ag country, where the deer are thick and human intrusion is far more common, I’d get random pictures of big bucks, and then never see them again.
Now, I know that big bucks roam and have pretty good sized home ranges, but it started to feel like a bit too much of a coincidence. I’d get a solid image of a good buck looking right at the camera, and then not get a picture of him again. Ever.
This might be total bunk, and I have no way of proving it, but I think some deer are starting to associate trail cameras with hunters in a way that makes them avoid certain areas. In the northwoods where I hunt, this makes the most sense because for much of the last couple of decades, baiting has been legal in that county.
Almost everyone does it, and almost everyone does it in a similar setup where three things are always found–the bait, a stand or blind, and a camera. Those things are also present during the season when the fourth element shows up, which is an actual hunter. If there is a template for educating deer on danger, it might be precisely that scenario. In fact, I’d bet that nearly every bait pile they run into across the country has a camera on it. The same holds true for kills plots, manmade waterholes, and any type of spot we curate to draw deer in.
But the cameras I run aren’t anywhere near a bait site, and these also seem to trigger a negative response in deer in those regions. Is that a conditioned response? I don’t honestly know, but it’s enough to get me to rethink my camera strategy.
You don’t need to hang your cameras seven feet off the ground to get pictures of deer during the summer or throughout the season. But that’s mostly what I do these days. It seems like getting cameras out of the eyeline of deer is an easy move that not only provides better imagery and videos, but spooks fewer deer.
I’ve also started to try to blend them in just a little bit more. This might mean threading some natural vegetation through the strap or placing cameras where the tree trunk branches out and obfuscates the whole look just a little bit.
I feel a little silly even writing this, but the thing is, I run cameras where I think I’ll want to hunt. It’s not just a hitlist gathering endeavor for me, but a method of scouting that I use to pinpoint ambush locations. If what I’m doing for any reason spooks deer off the location, or makes them question their safety there, I’ve defeated myself.
Maybe Kenyon’s neuroticism is rubbing off on me, I don’t know. What I do know is that most of the cameras I hang now are set as high as I can reach, and left for as long as I can leave them (which is pretty easy with cell cams). Does this help me kill more big bucks? I don’t know, but I don’t think it hurts my chances any.
And that’s good enough for me.
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