Ep. 766: Foundations - Long-Game Trail Camera Lessons

know it all. Sure, if you're into a small town bar and say southwest Wisconsin about I don't know, mid October, you'll inevitably meet someone who is fourteen beers deep, you know, wearing a faded real Tree shirt from nineteen ninety seven, who will let you know that. But he has the whole thing totally dialed. But the truth is he doesn't, and neither do you. I was reminded of this recently when I drove over to northern Wisconsin to cut down some trees, scout some deer, and pull a few cameras

I had left up from November. The images that I found when I checked those cameras, they have literally changed the course of my hunting plans for this year. They taught me a few things that you might be able to learn from as well. As I get older, I realized there's just like a lot of things that I actively dislike. A forced small talk that's way up there on the list. Social media, I was maybe right there at the top of the list. Standing in line for

any reason tends to get under my skin. Mark Kenyon, Well, you know, kind of just in general, it's pretty tough to deal with. But there is one thing about modern society that I absolutely love music, or more specifically, you can listen to any damn song you want at any time and can be exposed to new music all day long. You can search it out, you know, you could watch some new TV series that is chock full of interesting music.

It's all over. It has also led to an interesting conundrum for musicians in that anyone who has ever written a song might find music that is similar to theirs out there somewhere. Every once in a while you see a news story on this situation, where some popular artists will have to go to court to defend a chord progression or a specific melody after a different artist, usually a pretty much unknown artist, says that they wrote it first and that they got ripped off and are definitely

entitled to some enormous royalties. This is interesting because some musicians openly talk about how they lift certain riffs from their favorite guitarists or heavily lean on some type of music for inspiration. If there is a spirit of admiration in this and a tip of the hat to the inspiration, it's often an issue of respect and doesn't go to court. This tends to happen when two successful artists or bands collide, but isn't the case when a successful artist creates something

similar to a no namer. Now, there are legitimate cases of this, I'm sure, but these no namers also give off strong ambulance chaser vibes and it feels like they're looking for a payday and not much else. You know, then you have the classic plagiarizer accusations. I didn't know this until Larry recently, but apparently a lot of people thought Nirvana's anthem for disenfranchised teenagers in the early nineties smells like teen Spirit apparently sounds a hell of a

lot like Boston's more than a feeling. I guess maybe then you have the big one, led Zeppelin's monster, huge, mega hit, Stairway to Heaven, which, for all you young fellows out there struggling with the ladies, just learned to play the intro to that song on an acoustic guitar and at least you'll have a fighting chance since it's been a few decades since led Zeppelin topped the charts. Look

at it this way. They were like a group of Taylor Swifts, swifting it up all over the planet for quite a few years, and Stairway to Heaven was their biggest hit amongst a hell of a lot of big hits. In twenty sixteen, after Stairway to Heaven had been out for multiple decades, the bassist from a band called Spirit filed a lawsuit saying that led Zeppelin had ripped off some of his riffs. I guess a jury found that to be great a bullshit, but it was a good

try anyway. The thing about this stuff is that you can't escape inspiration if you're creating things. It's impossible to be a music lover and an artist and not draw from others' work. That's actually what's pretty cool about music and authors and painters and anyone who takes an idea and turns it into something that others can enjoy in some form. In that way, it's like a giant collaboration between different people. And do you know what else is like that? Golf? I'm sorry, I actually am sorry. I

feel really bad. I can't help myself. It's hunting, and more specifically hunting strategies and styles. We see what others are doing and we emulate them with kind of a personal twist. It's no different from hearing a song that worms its way into your brain and then finding yourself playing some chord progression that sounds an awful lot like that song, because, for whatever reasons, those sounds in that

order make you happy. With hunting, you might see someone who puts a series of food plots on a small property to not only draw a deer in, but funnel them through on a specific route. Or you might have a buddy who is a certified public land whitetail nutcase who runs cameras in a way that is just better

and different from your personal strategy. This is what happened to me with my buddy Clint Campbell, who coincidentally or maybe not, is also one hell of a guitar player, but you probably know him as the host of the Truth from the Stand podcast. But he's also a hunter

who plays the long game with trail cameras. He's always sending me pictures of big mountain bucks from Pennsylvania along with texts that explain how he's piecing together a large puzzle on ground that anyone can hunt, even though most of his competition isn't hunting the way he is, and certainly isn't scouting the way he is now. Clint's scouting style, you know, it's just vastly different from a lot of

public land whitetail hunters. He covers a lot of ground which is similar, you know, especially in the winter in the early spring months, he obsesses over access, deer sign, you know, all the usual suspects. But he also puts cameras out and leaves them for months at a time to gather a better picture of what the local bucks do through you know, different months, different weather events, different times of the year, when they might deal with tons

of people or almost know people. This is not something I've done a whole lot in my life, but I've started to lift a few riffs from Clint, if you will. It happened mostly by an accident of timing, at least the first time I left my cameras out. That was in northern Wisconsin, and I thought I'd have to have some time to run out and grab a camera before

winter set in. I didn't, and so one of my cameras stayed out there, shivering in the cold, but diligently taking pictures for me, so that when I pulled it in the spring, I got to see all kinds of interesting stuff. I got to see who made it through the gun season and who survived until various points of the winter. I got to see how a huge blizzard affected deer movement and what a three week thaw did

to their travels and habits. It was interesting, but mostly showed me that there were a couple of spots I probably should have had stands to sit during the rut. Since then, I've conducted a more deliberate trail camera strategy over there to see what the long game look into the deer world would reveal. This year, I took it to a higher level, I guess, kind of by leaving three cameras a piece on two different pieces of private

ground over there. I hung all of them in mid October while the rut was still going and the gun season was coming up quick. Now, when I went back to pull those cameras in the beginning of March, the

cards showed a story that was fascinating from start to finish. Well, if I'm being honest, five of the cameras did, because one of them never took a picture because I left it on setup mode and never actually started it, which is the deer hunting equivalent of filling a knee high sock with gravel and then swinging it as hard as you can right at your own knackers. The other five

did much better for starters. I wanted to see what the buck movement looked like during the Wisconsin gun season, since it's the time when about six hundred thousand people hit the woods with rifles in their hands. Now, while the deer movement definitely slowed down, then it didn't stop, not even the daylight movement at its most basic level. It showed that a lot of time and stand on either property would have probably led to an encounter with

a few different bucks. Listen. Not great, but not terrible. It also showed a group of dozes on one of my properties walking down a trail half an hour into the morning on the second day of the season. Then they spooked, and my buddy walked down the trail four minutes later on his way to sit one of my stands. He saw six dos, which is a lot for that area, and then walked out an hour and a half later.

He had no idea. He booted all of those doughs ahead of him on the way in, and he wasn't there long enough to witness any of the midday movement that happened there later. I've unintentionally run this experiment with him and his dad several times, and it's always a lesson in time on stand. They have very little faith in a buck walking by, so they don't put in hardly any time on stand in the midday or even

when it's prime time. Sometimes, judging by the picks I've gotten during the gun season, their strategy is costing them dear. Another interesting finding from just running multiple cameras during a busy gun season was that while there were days when the overall movement was really rough, the best buck movement was almost always between like nine am and two pm. That midday thing is real. It's just hard to believe for a lot of folks, especially in a high hunting

pressure situation. But if you think about it, if your state's gun season happens during the rut, which is real common, those bucks aren't going to stop chasing and cruising. You know, they might do a lot of their looking when there is a lull in the hunter activity, which happens in the middle of the day. I know you know that, but do you know it with experience or because you've heard dipshits like me say it? Because there's a big difference there. I was also really curious to see who

it was left after the gun season. I don't mean this just in terms of bucks either. The county we hunt over there offers up a huge amount of dought eggs, which makes zero sense to me, considering it took me twenty one days of hunting to see a single dough last fall. Maybe the deer managers over there know something I don't, or maybe I know something they don't anyway, I just wanted to see how many deer made it through.

I'd have guessed I might have had a couple of bucks on each property and a couple of dos but it was clear that at least six bucks made it through in each place, and that a decent amount of doz did as well, you know, pretty similar to the number of bucks. What was cool was that there was a mix of bucks at each place, ranging from barely spikes to one deer that is probably pushing one hundred and sixty inches, and who, by the couple of times I got pictures of him, showed me he does not

like trail cameras one bit. There's a lesson in there too. In fact, his reaction was not unlike just about every old long nosed dough that spotted my cameras over there. This year, all of my cameras will be a lot more discreet. What was really interesting in the post gun season findings, besides taking stock and the survivors, was seeing

the conditions that got the deer moving. We've had the mildest winter pretty much ever, I think, but the few cold fronts we had, you know, kind of during December, got the deer on their feet. No surprise there. It was just interesting to see on two different properties and also see once again how often they moved right in the middle of the day when it was very unlikely to be motivated by anything other than food. Definitely probably

not the rut. What really started to stand out to me as I filed through thousands of pictures was that the buck activity didn't really change much. From at least one perspective, there was far more consistent movement over there,

even if that movement wasn't all that frequent. What I mean by that is, for example, on one of the cameras that allows me to monitor a subtle trail that keeps the deer in the woods and away from the houses or openings or anything anywhere nearby where they might get spotted, there is always a buck in daylight at some point in every two or three day time period. Now this is in southern Iowa, so that's actually pretty good, considering a whole section over there might not even have

a dozen bucks using it on any given year. Where that camera was, there is now a sneaky access trail cut to a double trunk pine tree that will have a stand in it. For next fall, and I will go in there and I will hunt it hard during the rut. If I still have a tag left. I'm honestly more excited for that than anything this fall, besides, you know, getting another crack at putting one of my daughters on a bear. And keep in mind, I'm probably

going to draw an I would tag this year. Another zoom out epiphany that I had, which my buddy still doesn't believe, is that the northern Wisconsin deer don't behave much different from deer in you know, much better regions. There just aren't very many of them and they deal with a lot more predation. This is another thing that my camera showed me, even though I knew it. I can't prove this, but other than bears, it seems like the coyotes, bobcats, and wolves all showed up and stuck

around before moving on. Now this isn't to say there weren't plenty of random picks of predators, because I had plenty, but there were also times where it was obvious the same three coyotes were working the area around my camera heavily, and that the deer movement went way down because of this. I saw that saturation of coyotes and on both places wolves at different times, and as you can guess, when

that happens, it's best to go somewhere else. Even the bobcats seem to kind of group up and hang around for a while. But I'm, you know, a little bit more inclined to believe that's just a family unit that I'm seeing there. I also have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to this, I'm just spitballing. Maybe the biggest takeaway from this experiment, besides how important time in the woods really is no matter where you hunt, is that we often think about deer movement the wrong

way or in an incomplete way. I should probably say we think of summer bucks when we first start putting cameras out, you know, and seeing our bachelor groups, and as the summer moves toward fall, we start to think about, you know, well, fall movement. This is where we laser focus, and we think about feeding areas, staging areas, and funnels. You know, something that might work this week but not the next, or might be on fire next week, but

the deer just aren't quite there yet. A long game camera strategy kind of exposes that as faulty thinking, of course, a funnel might get busier in November when the chase is on, But that same funnel we'll probably host some buck travel in December two and January, and February and March and every dang month of the year, including September and October. What this means is that while you're waiting for everything to get right for a certain spot, the

deer might be out there using it their own leisure. Already, all of the cameras I hung in November were in spots that I thought would catch November movement. But November movement isn't as different from the movement in other months as we think, And that's important to acknowledge and if you can try to understand, because it has ramifications beyond where you'll do an all day sit during your rutation.

Just think about it this way. Take your favorite pinch point or maybe your favorite river crossing, run a camera on it for a year. What do you think you'd learn. My guess is that you'd learn that they are good spots beyond their usefulness and the timing window we focus on to actually hunt them. That's important for no other reason than to rewire your willingness to hunt whenever you can, versus hunting when you believe it only should be good. A long game camera strategy can teach you this, and

it's a lesson that is worth learning for everyone. It might not matter if you have a banging spot to hunt that no one else can set foot on, but when you're dealing with smaller spots or shared spots, understanding how consistent the deer movement is all year can put you in a spot to take advantage of that movement well outside the rut, or well outside of whatever weekends you feel like you might just want to hunt. It's

honestly a confidence thing, and that matters. It's intriguing enough to me that I'm already getting ready to put some cameras out and leave them at least until Midsummer. I feel like the value of their intel we won't be that high. But I also feel like I might be totally wrong on that. Plus, it's kind of like getting paid dividends on some stock or earning royalties from a book you wrote seven years ago. In other words, you

know you're making money while you sleep, sort of. A long game camera strategy is like that, and it's worth it if you have the opportunity. It's also worth it to listen next week because I'm going to take a deep dive into the topic of game management. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson and it's been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for all your support. We honestly appreciate it so much. Here

at meat Eater, all of us do. If you like this podcast, if you want to listen to Clay's podcast or something else, you want to check out some how to videos, some hunting episodes, read some articles, whatever, you can head on over to the medeater dot com. Tons of hunting content there. Maybe you want a new recipe. Ever, go there, check it out, and once again, thank you so much for your support. H