Buckmasters Magazine

Trail cameras and patience key to three-year quest for Illinois bruiser.

Trail cameras have had a huge impact during the last decade, fundamentally changing the way many of us approach hunting whitetails.

While it can be argued they give us an unfair advantage by showing what’s happening when we’re not in the woods, it’s also true they’ve made us better deer managers.

Not only do they teach us about whitetails and their habits, but trail cameras also are great tools for monitoring population numbers and sex ratios.

And, of course, they give us a pretty good picture of the type of bucks a given area produces, even allowing us to identify which deer to shoot and which to let go for another season or two.

Holding out for a particular buck isn’t for everybody, but it can be one of the most rewarding experiences of deer hunting, trail cameras or not.

Ben Royce had his eye on an Illinois monster for three years before he finally put a tag on it in 2014.

“I saw a 2 1/2-year-old buck that I thought had potential,” he said. “I kept my eye on it with hopes to shoot it in a year or two. It took a little longer to put it all together, but it finally happened last year. I caught him chasing does when he was 5 1/2 years old.”

When Ben first saw the buck, it already had a rack close to 140 inches. The other thing that caught his attention was how the deer remained fairly visible and stuck to a pattern.

“I think a mistake many guys make is they try to pattern a buck that has no pattern,” Ben said. “Some bucks are a lot easier to pattern than others. For some reason, this buck had a small home range, and the older he got, the less he traveled.”

Ben said he probably would have taken the buck when it was 3 1/2, but he never got an opportunity. Then came the worry over whether it would make it through the winter.

“When the buck was 4 1/2, I was sure my buddy Mike or I was going to get him,” he said. “We were wrong. He slipped through our fingers again. At the end of the 2013 season, we had two pictures of the him on a trail camera. He was about 160 inches that year, and we faced another long, anxious winter.”

When the summer of 2014 came around, Ben decided to dedicate more time to figuring out the buck’s pattern.

“I live about an hour and a half from where I hunt, so I spent the summer trying to figure him out,” Ben said. “I put out 12 trail cameras across the 2,000 acres we hunt. Most of the land is crop fields, so it can be hard to pattern a buck when he can travel the cornfields at night. Along with the cameras, we spent a lot of time scouting on foot.”

Ben said one of the keys to keeping the buck on the property was minimizing the pressure they put on it. He was careful not to check the cameras too often and went to great lengths to avoid running into the buck by accident.

“Although this buck didn’t have an extremely large core area, I kept my distance and tried not to push him,” Ben said. “I always scouted from a distance. I worked field edges, trying to figure out which fields he liked most and which travel corridors he used. He never caught on to my activities.”

Even with a dozen cameras running, the hunters got just one video of the buck in 2014.

“We didn’t see the activity we were hoping for and had just one video to go on,” Ben said. “We decided to hunt near that camera and rely on information from past years.”

He said it was tempting to focus on that area, move a bunch of cameras in there and hunt it every day. Instead, they did the opposite.

“We knew he was in that area, and we didn’t want to spook him,” the hunter said. “We decided to hunt there only when the wind was just right and during cold fronts. If I scheduled vacation days to hunt and it turned out to be warm, I went to work and saved the vacation time for better days.

“I hunted that stand just four times during the entire season,” he continued. “I’m convinced we would have pressured that deer into changing his habits had we hunted there when conditions were anything less than ideal.”

Standing corn was another big factor. While Ben was sure he knew where the buck was hanging out, it was almost unkillable as long as it stuck to the standing crops.

“The thing about this area is there are very few travel corridors besides the corn,” Ben said. “We knew our chances would go way up the moment bucks started running does.”

Ben had planned to take off work to hunt on Nov. 10, but it was too warm. After looking at the weather forecast, he circled Nov. 13 on his calendar.

“I was antsy throughout the season, but I knew I had to wait for the perfect wind and weather,” he said. “When I saw there was going to be a 30-degree temperature drop, I made my move. When that cold front came in, the bucks started going crazy.”

Even better, the corn had finally been cut, further raising the hunter’s spirits.

“When I climbed in my first stand, I expected to see a ton of deer, but it was extremely slow,” Ben said. ”After awhile, I decided to go to a spot where the buck had spent a lot of time in the past. I got into that stand, and he walked by 15 minutes later. I guess going with my gut paid off.”

We can all learn from Ben’s successful hunt.

For starters, if you want to shoot a big buck, you have to hunt where big bucks roam. It sounds simple, but quite a few hunters complain about not shooting bigger bucks while they head out to the same stands where they’ve shot small bucks for the past 10 years.

Something in that cycle has to change if you want to shoot a giant. Either young bucks must be given a chance to grow older or, if those around you are shooting everything with antlers regardless of age, you need to hunt a different location.

And that’s not a knock on non-trophy hunters. Not many of us have the restraint to pass up a 130-inch 2 1/2-year-old, but that’s what it takes to have bucks in the 150s and 160s.

Finally, if you’re after a giant, you have to do a lot of homework and get to know the land you’re hunting, the deer on it and how they use it.

“I knew that buck and his pattern,” Ben said. “Using multiple cameras over several years, we really figured him out. We knew where he bedded and where the does bedded. There were only so many places he could travel, and since there wasn’t much pressure on him, he continued to do the same thing year in and year out.”

Another thing about mature bucks is they’re not all the same. Some are roamers and some are homebodies. Most are a mixture of both.

“As he got older, it seemed like my buck traveled less and relied on his favorite bedding and feeding areas most of the time,” Ben said. “His pattern of sticking to the same small area is why I had to be so careful. With a buck like that, you have to be patient and wait for the perfect time to take him.”

Of course, your odds of shooting a big buck aren’t the same everywhere. Places like the Midwest not only have more mature bucks, the land itself makes it easier to pattern and hunt a particular deer. Once crops have been harvested, they’re often limited to small fingers of hardwoods, creek beds and wind breaks.

That said, you can still pattern bucks in other locations with scouting and careful use of trail cameras. Just like farms in the Midwest, big woods tracts have land features that funnel deer movement, even if they don’t stick out like a finger of hardwoods in a cut cornfield.

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