I've been using trail cameras to keep track of bucks and pattern deer movement since the days of the old 35mm film models. Fast forward to present day, and I no longer need to wait for the one-hour film development to see what's visiting that hot scrape or feeding on my food plot. In fact, my wait is reduced to just a couple minutes, because that's all it takes for the images to be transmitted from my Moultrie XA-7000i cellular trail camera to the Moultrie Mobile app on my smartphone. Now every time that notification goes off, the excitement builds as the image loads and I wait to see what's going on in the woods.
As is often the case this time of year, a lot of the deer activity at the scrape my camera is watching has been happening at night. That means as soon as my alarm goes off in the morning, I'm opening the app to see what visited the night before. On the morning of November 1, I woke up to quite a surprise. Even from the thumbnails on the app it was easy to see had been a busy night. It should come as no surprise that all the activity was happening on Halloween, as that's always been my favorite time to try and be in the woods if at all possible. But if I can't be in the woods, having a trail camera sending me nearly real-time updates of the action is the next best thing.
Getting the pictures sent right to my phone is a great feature, but the real bread and butter was stored on the SD card inside the camera. After seeing the pictures of multiple bucks in front of the camera, I frantically opened the camera settings in the app to double check if I had the camera set to take photos and videos. Luckily, I did. While the camera settings allow for 5-, 10-, 30-, 60- or 90-second video clips, I had chosen 30-second clips as a nice middle ground. Enough to capture plenty of action, but not so much as to fill the SD card before I could retrieve it. If you follow us on Instagram (@grandviewoutdoors) you saw the cover image for this article already. Now you can see the video, too.
That night, the camera captured a picture of the 10-pointer, followed a minute later by a picture of the smaller 9-pointer. Both bucks moved off to the east and down a small ridge into a swamp before reappearing 10 minutes later. That's where this video starts and the action really heats up!
You'll notice at around the 1:46 mark of the video that the bucks are so close, you can see their breath rising up in front of the camera. Shortly after that, one of the bucks bumps into the camera with enough force to slide it around the tree about 20 degrees. That's why the field of view changes with the last clip, where you can just make out the victor making a scrape in the background before walking off. I have since captured three different bucks and multiple does on camera checking that scrape.
This is the time of year to have your trail camera monitoring a hot scrape, whether it's natural or a mock scrape you've made. You never know what you might get on camera.
