Late-Summer Camera Placement
By Mark Melotik
With summer upon us, most trail camera users likely have at least a few cameras in the woods gathering intel. That’s all well and good, but another important trail camera window is approaching quickly. We’ve previously covered early summer strategies, but according to Justin Lanclos of Spypoint, you would be smart to move some of your cameras to new locations.
“A great time to move your cameras is late August into early September — the bachelor group time,” Justin said. “The top two reasons are to help you get a chance at arrowing a good buck early in the season, and to start preparing for the rut.”
Justin said late-summer is a great time to start deploying more cameras to pinpoint buck travel corridors. He also noted that if you don’t run cellular cameras, be sure you have enough SD cards and quality batteries so you’re not making unnecessary trips in and out of your hunt area.
“That’s something a lot of people blame on the brands,” Justin said. “Cameras require good cards and good batteries. If your cards are not formatted there are going to be problems. If you use Lithium AAs and formatted SD cards, that will alleviate 90% of your problems.”
As far as specific camera placement, Justin says it’s a fairly straightforward strategy beginning in late summer.
“You want to focus on agriculture fields (which is where they are going to feed) and how they are getting there. And this will show you where to set up. This is really the only time of year it’s this easy. Bucks are so much more predictable, you’ve got a good month or so when they’re basically doing the same thing.”
One reason for deploying more cameras during this period, Justin said, is to determine which specific trails bucks are taking to favored food sources. Learn those trails, and your early season ambush is mostly set.
One cool feature of some newer SpyPoint cameras is something called Time Lapse Plus, which is ideal for watching ag fields. The feature improves on previous time lapse technology by not only taking photos at regular intervals throughout the day, but also taking motion-sensor images whenever needed. This helps ensure you won’t miss bucks that wander through between your chosen picture interval.
“With Time Lapse Plus, you can cover an entire field with just one camera,” Lanclos said. “You want to know the time when the local bachelor group is coming in to feed. It’s the closest thing to actually being there.”