Deer hunters know that game cameras are among the most valuable tools for gathering data about bucks and does, but do you know one of the best times to use cameras to increase you chances of success during the hunting season?
Tom Miranda’s new book, The Rut Hunters, offers outstanding information from some of the top deer hunters in the country. Check out this excerpt from the book:
One individual who has not only made a well-respected name for himself in the arena of all-things-deer, but has also taken his share of Northern Woodlands bucks is Bill Winke. Through his years of outdoors writing and more recently his dedication to producing quality television, like his educational and entertaining Midwest Whitetail show, Winke’s name has become synonymous with taking a systematic and intelligent approach to targeting and outsmarting bucks.
Over the years Winke has been there and done it all to kill whitetails, and his current go-to strategy is one most hunters can utilize provided they pay close attention to the details.
“Something that I’m doing is truly gathering information from our trail cameras. We’ve figured out which bucks to hunt and how to hunt them from the information we’ve gleaned from our cameras. In fact, we come really close to killing every buck that we go after now, which is pretty cool when you’re trying to kill a single buck on purpose,” Winke explained when asked of his current hunting secrets.
“To start this strategy it’s important to identify a food source. For me, in many places that is either a small agricultural field or a food plot. In the big woods that may be a clearcut of the right age or even a few early-dropping oak trees on a ridge. What I like to do is set up a camera on a hot food source and run it for about 10 days or so. That has proven to be long enough to get most deer on camera, and will often let you identify which bucks are going to make your hit list. If possible, dumping corn or other attractants in front of your camera can be a shortcut to identifying all of the bucks in your hunting area.”
No matter how you decide to approach this initial stage, make sure it occurs after the bucks are established in their fall patterns.
Although it’s extremely popular to run cameras in the summer to catch images of velvet-antlered bucks, the information you can glean from such images only goes so far considering some of those bucks will disperse to new areas once they shed their velvet.
Tom Miranda of the Whitetail SLAM has authored a new book, The Rut Hunters. This Tom Miranda blog features excerpts from the book, which has information from some of the best deer hunters in the country. GET IT NOW