It’s mid-June already. Do you know where your deer are?
If the answer is no, it’s about time to be getting answers.
Sure, it’s been hot out and the only thing biting better than the bass is, unfortunately, the mosquitoes. There are tents to pitch, water to paddle and campfires to start.
But deer season will be here before you know it.
Seriously.
Hunting licenses go on sale on June 19 and in Pennsylvania, the application process for doe licenses gets rolling in July.
The time to start at least identifying if not yet patterning deer is now.
So says Mike Stroff, host of Savage Outdoors TV and operator of Southern Outdoor Experience Hunts, a Texas-based guiding service. And trail cameras are the tool for getting the job done.
“I definitely use them as a year-round tool,” Stroff said.
He gets really serious no later than July, when he uses them to see where bucks are and how they’re growing. He then examines what bucks are available to hunt using cameras put out in August and September and finally inventory what bucks survived by running cameras in winter.
But now is when he gets started.
So, too, does C.J. Winand, a Maryland-based wildlife biologist and deer hunting author. He’ll take what he learns now and then really put it to use in late summer and early fall, say August and September.
He puts bait out where legal, and focuses on natural foot plots where it’s not, to up his chances of seeing deer.
More cameras are better than fewer, he added. He recommends using one camera for every 80 to 100 acres of ground.
Run those for 10 days, he said, and that will reveal 75 to 90 percent of the bucks, does and fawns on a property. Run them for 14 days and that goes to 90 to 95 percent.
“It’s the best way to tell you who, what and where lives there,” Winand said.
As for how to use cameras, Stroff shoots more photos than video with his cameras, just because photos take up so much less storage space. But video has advantages in that it often offers longer, better looks at individual deer, he admitted.
He puts cameras out on food plots, water holes in especially dry country, pinch points and scrapes.
Deer may not visit the latter during daylight hours, so cameras reveal deer that might otherwise go unknown, he said.
“He may not be coming to that scrape in the daytime, but now I know he lives in this timber block. And you cannot kill him unless you hunt where he lives,” Stroff said.
That’s hugely important, he added. He credits some of his biggest best deer to trail cameras.
“Some of those early season bucks especially, we kill them because the cameras killed them,” he said.
“They’re still bachelored up, they’re still in their summer pattern, it still all about the food, and because of the cameras we’re able to pattern them. We can predict where they’re going to be by putting together a 20-day trend of what that deer has done.”
The key is to start looking for deer sooner rather than later.
So what are you waiting for?
