I can’t run trail cameras in a lot of the places I hunt. I love that, but I also love running a whole bunch of cameras to try to decipher deer movement from year to year on specific properties. This latter tactic was a big part of my fall this year, and I noticed something that has led me to more questions than answers.
On the surface, this is not the best reflection on cameras in general. After all, shouldn’t they just tell us where and when deer move, and we can call that good enough? Well, they do that. But they also clue us into things that might be beyond our understanding when it comes to deer behavior.
The most obvious of these in my life, I’ve just started calling whitetail parties. And honestly, I have no real idea why they happen.
Heavy Movement Days
In northern Wisconsin, I own a 30-acre property and have access to another piece of private that consists of 120 acres. This year, just because I could, I ran five cameras on each parcel.
Keep in mind this is in a low deer density area, and although the properties are about 15 miles apart, movement trends on one are almost always reflected on the other. And most of the time, that movement sucks.
But while I was in Nebraska this year, my cameras were very busy in Wisconsin. There’s no surprise there, since it was the first week of November. By the time I got home and drove across the river to salvage the rut in Packer territory, my cameras had gone cold again.
And by cold, I mean literally no daylight pictures on any camera for multiple days in a row. My hunting reflected that, even though I managed to stumble into a good one after not seeing a deer for four days.
What was really curious to me was that a few days after I drove home, I had another day where my cameras lit up. All day long, on both properties, bucks and does walked in front of my cameras. I think you could have killed a deer off of every stand and blind I have on the two properties, which is saying something. The following two days, I had one doe in daylight on 10 cameras.
Now, you might be thinking that this is easily explainable, but I don’t think so.
Predictable Movement Isn’t Usually So
Look, cold fronts get deer moving, and some wind is better than no wind. The rut is a huge factor. We know all of this stuff, and plenty of people go even deeper with the belief that the moon phase is a big driver.
Why days happen when the deer just seem to move might be tied to any one of these factors, or more likely several, but I think it’s something else. I see deer parties on my cameras in September, October, November, and December. In weather you’d expect them, and weather that isn’t any different from any other day in a long stretch of time. It’s never isolated to just one property, and sometimes happens in different states.
I don’t know what it means, honestly. But I do know that it has changed how I hunt.
Put Time On Your Side
If you could figure out exactly when most of the deer were most likely to move all day long, and predict it with some level of accuracy, you could go yacht shopping pretty quickly. There are a lot of people, and increasingly, a lot of technology, that promise just that. But again, if it were true, and the secret was something that could be shared for money, none of us would worry too hard about stringing together a bunch of low- or no-activity sits.
How I look at this is simpler—I know that those days exist, even if I can’t really tell you why. Even during the rut, I’ve sat through a hell of a lot of really boring days, so it’s not something that is easily solvable, even when it should be.
Instead, I try to string together a block of days to sit whenever I can. Instead of just looking at the forecast and deciding that the upcoming cold front is the best chance to climb into a stand for the evening, I try to block off at least a couple of days at a time.
I know that not everyone can do that, but three or four days of hard hunting in a row gives you a chance to catch one of those magic days. I don’t know how to put it any other way. I wish I had a better strategy to offer up, but the truth is, a lot of trail camera usage has led me to believe that patience and time on stand is what it will take for me to eventually have one of those days where your head is on a swivel because the deer just keep showing up.
It’s a confidence thing, even if it can’t be drilled down precisely. You can get pretty close, and that’s good enough to have a hell of a lot of fun out there, and eventually, fill a tag. It’s also the antidote to the current hunting mindset of waiting out for perfect conditions to hunt, which is a recipe for unfilled tags. I’d rather dedicate myself to a few blocks of time where I might capture whitetail lightning in a bottle than try to cherry-pick a few hours that might produce for me but probably won’t.
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