I like to put cameras up and angle them down if possible. I don’t think the bucks can hear the camera and be out of view that quick.
It’s not uncommon to get very few buck pics in August when it’s hot!
No, that is not what I meant. Mature bucks know their home range like you know your living room. When your wife moves your furniture and you come home, you notice it. Likewise, when something is out of place bucks notice it. It is a combination of sight, sound, smell, etc. Younger less warry deer will often trigger a pic before a buck come into view. I happened to be testing a couple cameras years ago so I had multiple cams in the same place. One was set in video mode. The cam set in still mode got a great picture of a young buck. This was in a field. The video showed that after that picture was taken, the young buck continued through the field. It was followed by increasingly mature bucks. The more mature bucks in that group angled away from the camera trigger zone and walked around it and joined the younger bucks to feed in the bottom of the field out of range.
If I had not had the one camera in picture mode, I would have only thought there was one small buck. The cam in video mode was triggered by that small buck but was set to run for over a minute on trigger and that was the only way I knew the more mature bucks were there. These were some low end cams before I went with the high end system. They were not up permanently. It could have been my scent from setting them, the sight of them, the sound of the IR filter, or something else. This one was not flash avoidance as it was daytime.
Any or all of these factors can cause mature bucks to avoid triggering a camera. I've spoken in other posts about how I showed the sex/age bias when using red blob flash that goes away when you use true black flash. Most folks using these cams for hunting don't really care about the bias, but when using the data for QDM data analysis and decision making, the measurement bias can skew the statistics significantly.
Looking at large data sets let me see things statistically that we don't notice in anecdotally. I was then able to set up different multi-camera scenarios to learn more how my deer relate to cameras. By changing my setup and then analyzing large data sets, I could see how the changes statistically reduced the bias.
What I learned:
- Visual cues are important for mature bucks for the first few months a camera is positioned. This can be mitigated to some degree by elevating cameras angling them down but it often reduces the detection range. This technique works well on point source targets like scrapes where detection range is not important. After the first couple months, mature bucks generally completely accept the camera as part of their environment.
- Human intrusion can impact mature bucks for several weeks. A lot depends on the situation, but after at least a couple weeks, this is not a significant factor.
- Noise has a significant impact on how mature bucks relate to a camera. I would often get a single pic of a mature buck near the camera. After that, I may only see that buck when the camera was triggered by a doe or younger buck and he was in the background.
- Flash avoidance has a similar effect as noise. These rarely scare the buck, they just make it uneasy. The uneasiness simply makes them cautious and they will keep younger deer between them and the concern. At night, they are often just on the fringe of the flash and it takes photoshop manipulation of the pic to realize that.
One final note: All of this is generally true, but every deer is unique and has different tolerances. Like most things, deer behavior falls under a bell shaped curve. I'm describing how mature bucks at the middle of that bell shaped curve act. Individual bucks can relate to cameras in very different ways. The other caveat is that things like bait piles are not used and point source attractants can significantly alter deer behavior. They can overcome much of the risk associated with reward.
Thanks,
Jack