Are You Running Post-Season Trail Cameras?
By Mark Melotik
So you didn’t bag the trophy buck you worked so hard to encounter this past fall? How energizing would it be for your 2025 prep, to know a local giant or two made it through your state’s many hunting seasons? Taking inventory of post-season survivors is maybe the best and most obvious reason to keep your trail cams working in the woods in late winter, but there are other benefits as well.
You don’t have to be told that cellular trail cameras are all the rage, and if you choose to extend those service plans a month or two (rather than cancelling after your final hunt), you might also be rewarded by getting some solid intel on mature buck late-season patterns. And that might open up more post-rut hunt opportunities in years to come.
Capturing mature bucks on your cameras during the post season is no easy task, but your first goal should be hanging them near suspected primary food sources. And that likely means moving cameras previously situated in hot rut funnels that have long since dried up. Whether the local menu is corn, soybeans, remnant acorns or dense, far-northern cedar swamps and bigwoods clearcuts, bucks will now be concentrating on filling their bellies.
To my mind, checking post-season trail cameras equipped with SD cards should be done infrequently, if at all, to avoid spooking hard-hunted, mature bucks. It’s now that cellular cams once again more than earn their keep by allowing you to place them in those deep-cover haunts mature bucks crave post-season.
Whether you study your post-season trail camera intel in real time via cell cams, or wait until spring to peruse those SD cards, don’t forget to combo your camera data with a good hunting app. Today’s apps allow you to keep track of all your trail camera locations, and you can study monthly satellite imagery that will clue you into primary winter food sources and the area’s best thermal bedding cover. And when you can condense and cross-reference all of that info onto your very own custom hunt area map, that’s where a good app really shines.
Once you’ve logged where your cameras have captured images of survivor bucks, along with the past fall’s fresh rublines, scrapes, major trails and more, you can quickly get a picture of just how the local bucks relate to your hunting area — during all the important stretches of the year.