It’s pretty simple, really, but often not all that productive. If you’ve got a property locked up and know that no one will come in and mess with the summer patterns, then yes, you can plan a strategy around those images. But be honest, you were going to hunt those spots anyway, because they’re no-brainer locations for early-season bowhunting setups.
The problem with scouting that way is that it works with a good summer destination food source — but then, those patterns crumble just before or right after you get your first chance to slip in with a bow and try to intercept a target buck. This is where trail cameras can hurt us if we’re not careful.
It’s easy to hunt on memory, but a buck that has bailed on his summer food pattern isn’t likely to return to it in a way that will allow you to encounter him during shooting hours. This is especially true if you’re hunting pressured ground, whether public or private.
A better bet with scouting cameras is to use them to figure out what is going on in the places where you’re really not sure what the activity level is, or to sort out the routes target bucks are taking as they travel to/from food sources. Practically speaking, this is what scouting is all about, and it’s possible with the right camera strategy.
The idea obviously is to identify good bucks that might be moving during legal shooting hours, then pin down locations you can sneak into, and actually hunt, correctly. Doing so isn’t nearly as easy as we’d like to believe, though. If it were, success rates would be much, much higher.
Each year I hunt whitetails on public land in four or five states, and if there’s one thing I find consistently, it’s that the easy spots are nearly always worthless to hunt outside the hottest part of the rut. The better bucks I see, and occasionally arrow, almost always have made the mistake of moving during daylight either on a travel route or in a staging area, both of which will be in security cover.
While some big bucks seem to be terribly ensconced in a nocturnal lifestyle, most aren’t. They just don’t move a whole lot during daylight in any place but their favorite sanctuaries. This information matters, because those might be the only spots in which you’ll ever encounter them with enough daylight to get a legal shot.
These spots will almost always relate to a destination food source. That’s true even in the Northwoods, where there isn’t an agricultural field or food plot within miles. The deer usually have a feeding place in mind, but they’ll take their sweet time getting there — and most often, you’ll run out the clock before they poke their nose into any open areas.
So while the soybean field on your farm or parcel of public land is where the bucks will probably end up each night, how they get there and how they leave are what matter most to us hunters. The same goes for the oak ridge in the big woods or an irrigated alfalfa field out west.
It’s important to remember here that the July woods can look a lot different from the September woods, and another thing entirely when you consider November. The first, most likely staging area off the food will last until the leaves drop or hunting pressure on the field edges pushes the deer deeper, or maybe persuades them to stay even farther back.
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