Using Trail Cameras To Help You Determine When To Shed Hunt

By Alex Comstock

Trail cameras are a tool that you can use throughout the entire year, not just during deer season. So how can trail cameras be helping you in February? Well today, that’s what this blog post is all about.

Shed Hunting Help

In my mind, trail cameras can be a big help to you when it comes to shed hunting. What I mean by this is they can help you specifically when it comes to determining when to start shed hunting. This is a topic I think some people struggle with. Deer season is over, there isn’t much to do out in the deer woods, and you want to start finding antlers. Heck, maybe you see a half rack buck, and that adds fuel to the fire to get out right now. But, just because you do see a half rack buck, that doesn’t mean all of the bucks have shed. So, the question then becomes, how do you know when to start shed hunting? One helpful resource is this article I wrote last month, “Here’s How To Figure Out When To Start Shed Hunting”, and one of the tactics I touch on is using trail cameras. Below, I’ve included a video on the topic, and then I’ll talk about it more below the video.

To recap the video, I like to run trail cameras and then when I’m checking them, I’m looking at how many antlered buck I have on camera, compared to the amount of shed bucks. One thing I didn’t cover in the video is that a great place to have your camera is on some type of food source, where you’re more likely to get more pictures of deer. Once you start pulling SD cards and have more shed bucks than antlered bucks on camera, that can be your indication that it’s time to start searching for sheds.

Conclusion

If you jump right into an area not knowing if bucks had shed or not, and they haven’t, you could just be pushing bucks out of an area before they even shed, and therefore lessen your chances of finding antlers at all. Patience can be required this time of year. By utilizing those trail cameras, you can be better prepared on when to get out there and start putting on the miles, which hopefully results in some amount of piles.