Embrace the Latest Technology in Trail Cameras to Kill More Bucks

Similarly, if you ask most hunters how they feel about technology taking over, a lot of them will say it will be the death of hunting. Yet, the lines we draw in the sand are our own and subject to change real fast. Back in the 1960s, when Holless Allen spent his time tinkering with a traditional bow to make it more efficient, he probably didn’t realize that he was about to divide the small bowhunting community into two factions.

His Allen Compound Bow, a revolutionary weapon built with a crude system of cams and pulleys, hit the market in 1967. When it did, the backlash was swift and predictable. Today, if you took one of his bows to the field, your hunting partners would have you involuntarily committed to a State Hospital, and not the kind that stitches up wounds and sets broken bones, either.

Advancing technology is just a materialistic evolution, and it won’t stop. This is most evident in today’s trail cameras, which, in a couple of decades, have undergone massive changes. While this is probably hard for young hunters to imagine, the first trail cameras had actual disposable film cameras inside of them. You had to take the film out, run it to someplace that could develop the roll, and then look through the pictures to see if you had anything good. You usually didn’t.

Now, trail cameras are something else entirely, and if you’ve made the leap to cell cameras, you’ve embraced the latest technology. The next step is to learn how to really use it to your advantage.

New Features & Modes

It’s standard for cell cameras to offer the usual array of customizable settings. Trigger sensitivity, burst mode, trigger delay, multiple resolution options for videos and images, and a whole bunch of standard stuff. Learning what is best for your setup and then catering your camera to that situation only makes sense.

For example, if you want to catch some rut action, having your camera set to take just one picture and then wait two minutes before it’ll take another is not a great idea. You want to get an image of the doe and the buck that’s chasing her. Multi-shot mode with a short turnaround between triggering events is the ticket here. Or, you can opt for a minute-long video clip to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Today’s cameras go much further than that, however. I recently took a couple of Moultrie cell cameras out into the woods in northern Wisconsin to gather some intel. I set up one of their EDGE 2 PRO cameras on the edge of a swamp where two trails intersect. I honestly don’t know how this camera does it, but I set it up to capture deer only. The raccoons are thick in that spot, and when the turkeys move through, they tend to stick around. Neither of those critters interest me in the summer or early fall, so I cut down on the white noise by using the Smart Capture feature in their Moultrie Mobile app to set the camera to feed me only deer pics.

Because the spot where I hung that camera is on a hillside, it’s ripe for deer coming in on one of the higher trails. When they do, they’ll trip the camera the instant they walk into the frame. That is a common occurrence with all cameras, in my experience, but the EDGE 2 PRO offers the Smart Zone feature. This allows you to look at their app and see a gridded-out image of what the camera sees. Simply tap each spot on the grid that you want to make off-limits for a critter (or anything) to be able to trigger the camera.

On my setup, every grid on the far left side of the camera is selected because that’s where deer would be closest to my camera and are most likely to trigger a premature image. Now, they need to walk farther into the frame before the camera does its thing.

Tweak, Learn & Keep Trying

Today’s cameras offer up a world of technology that would make Fred Bear roll in his grave, but the real secret is how your smartphone is now a part of the camera ecosystem. The apps these companies develop to support their offerings allow for a wide variance of features, and that’s part of the fun.

Some offer weather forecasts or will chart the activity from your various cameras to tell you when you should probably call in sick to work to get into a tree. Some offer the ability to share images with your hunting partners, which may or may not be appealing depending on how secretive you are about your hitlisters.

All of this is to say that if you’re going to use cell cameras, you might as well try to learn to use them as effectively as possible. The latest offerings are packed full of features that might help you kill a big deer this fall, or they might not help you at all. It’s up to you to mess around and figure that out if that’s at all appealing.

It might not be. The latest technology isn’t for everyone, but if history is any indicator, it probably will be in a few years. Then, something new and game-changing will make our current gadgets seem like relics from the past.

For more information on summertime scouting, check out these articles: 5 Summer Lies Deer Hunters Tell Themselves, The Basics Of Summer Scouting, and How To Summer Scout For Public Land Whitetails.