Your Best Friend in the Woods
By Craig Dougherty
The last 5 years have seen an absolute explosion in trail camera popularity, and for good reason. They are not only cool and fun to use but when used correctly they can dramatically increase your chances of scoring in the field.
We’ve been using scouting cameras for almost 15 years on our farm and I can honestly say we would be lost without them. Back in the day of film cameras we used them like most hunters did. We’d load them up with film, put them on a bait station or deer trail, and hoped to catch a good buck on film.
Basically, we were judging a beauty pageant, hoping to cover the cabin bulletin board with big-buck pin-ups. The trouble was, each and every time we hit the woods we were stinking up the place with man-scent and the big buck photos got scarcer as the season moved on. When we finally concluded we were scaring more big bucks than photographing, we put them on the shelf and started saving money on film and developing photos.
Scouting cameras have come a very long way since then. Today’s cameras are high-tech digital affairs capable of incredible accuracy. They don’t alarm deer and are capable of storing hundreds of images on a single digital chip. They record date, time, temperature, moon phase and the Red Sox /Yankees scores. They range in price from a hundred bucks or so for your basic models to a thousand or so for remote location setups which let you check out what’s going on from your office or I-Phone.
To view more articles from the premier issue of Whitetails Only, pick up a copy of Outdoors Magazine today or Subscribe Now!
