What I Learned about Whitetails from Year-Round Trail Camera Use

What those year-round cameras did for me was change how I view whitetails, particularly bucks. One of the most interesting takeaways involves predators and their impact on deer movement. Here are a few things I learned from year-round intel.

Back when we filmed the first season of One Week in November, I started my hunt on a property in south-eastern Minnesota. The first morning, while sitting over a pinch point and waiting on a cruising buck, I watched a forky bound through like he’d seen a ghost. A little while later, a coyote came down the main trail.

I figured that might be it for the morning, but it was the first of November and I had nowhere else to be, so I rode it out. An hour later I was standing over a 155-inch eight-pointer that came down the same trail. It was a good lesson, but it was still the prime rut where anything can happen.

The presence of predators at other times of the year must have a more outsized impact on immediate deer movement, or so I thought. After a couple years of running year-round trail cameras in northern Wisconsin, where the density of bears, wolves, coyotes, and bobcats is high, the truth became more evident.

I realized that at least with bears, coyotes, and bobcats, their presence seemed to have a short-lived effect on overall deer movement in the same locations, while wolves seemed to have a much more meaningful impact. While my sample size is small and highly anecdotal, my observations showed me two things.

If a single wolf comes in and hangs around, which happened a couple years ago on a property I hunt a lot, it seems like the deer traffic normalizes pretty quickly. An entire pack is a different story. This happened on that same property last year, and it pushed a heck of a lot of the deer and the coyotes to the fringe habitat closer to the roads and houses. It was a real eye opener, and one I probably won’t forget any time soon.

One spot I’ve run cameras on pretty much steady for three seasons is a pinch point next to a swamp. It’s not a very obvious terrain trap, but definitely funnels deer movement. It’s a rut hotspot, for obvious reasons.

It’s also one of the most consistent locations I’ve ever found for just general deer movement, which becomes much clearer when you hunt where the deer density is really low. Deer use that swamp edge all year long, with enough frequency to realize that focusing on terrain traps for mostly rut hunting is selling the whole thing way short.

While we all love sitting over a good food source or maybe a water source, if you want to have deer close and vulnerable, figure out the land. Learn where the deer have to walk, and then hang a camera and wait. Over three years I’ve watched that spot produce more action than I ever would have predicted. Hunt those pinch points and funnels during the rut, but don’t forget they can produce every day of the season if the deer have any reason to walk from one side to the other (which they probably do).

A week or so ago, I got a trail camera video of a young buck visiting a scrape. He raked his velvet antlers on the overhanging branches and just did his thing. I showed it to one of my daughters, because in the 2024 season we sat 40 yards from that scrape with a doe decoy out. With half an hour of shooting light left, a young buck popped out of the swamp, eyed up his potential girlfriend, and then put on a show. He pawed that scrape up, peed in it, stood on his hind legs, and raked the branches overhead. Then he made the mistake of trotting into bow range.

I’d rather hunt around a bunch of rubs than a community scrape for most of the season. The middle 10 days of October are an exception, but I am fascinated by scrapes. I’ve left cameras on a few of them for a couple years, and I’ve learned that I don’t know shit about scrapes and why deer use them.

They visit them every month of the year, and while they don’t always go to town and work them, it seems like every single deer that comes in will at least give the licking branch a little sniff and a taste. I’ve come to believe that the urine-soaked dirt is important, but not nearly as important as the licking branch. That doesn’t really matter much to a hunting strategy, but it’s an interesting takeaway.

It’s also just fun to realize that some of the sign we associate strictly with fall activity actually functions as a communication tool all season long. I never would have learned that if I had been responsible and pulled some of my cameras at the end of the season.