We’re now less than 3 weeks away from the opening day of bow season and I am getting really excited! We run cameras on my dad’s farm 365 days a year. We want to know what deer are using the property and at what times. I love getting pictures of fawns and all stages in the bucks growing/shedding cycle. It helps to have cameras that have long battery life. We are using the Bushnell Trophy and Recoynx brand trail cameras. We move them around a lot at the various stages.

We place them over bait right after the season is over, when the deer are about to shed so we can get an accurate estimate of how many bucks have dropped before we move in to look for them.  Then we start to replenish our mineral sites around the farm in mid March and run them from those locations all summer long. We leave them over minerals until we believe they have maxed out on growth. After that point we move them to trails and in the air on time lapse in the areas we are getting regular pictures of certain bucks to get MRI (most recent information) on what their patterns are.

We have been running trail cameras for 6 years now. Our best location for getting pictures and sightings of bucks has been the same year after year. It is an area of the farm we call The Hill. It is the highest point of the farm and the deer work their way into this area in the evening before heading down to the ag fields to feed. They end up back in this field in the middle of the night to eat clover and bed for the night. Once daylight breaks they begin to work their way back to the timber. I usually check our cameras every 9-10 days. With a 1-minute delay we will usually have over 1100 pictures in that time span. We average around a ¼ of those being of bucks.

Here is one of the bucks that have consistently been photographed at this site the past 3 years.

 ~Andy Yost~

August 24th:

Trail Camera Update

Rick and I have been operating 7 trail cameras for the last month.  Most of the cameras have been placed over mineral sites and a couple on food sources.  The surprise has been which camera produced the most buck activity.  This camera was located near a mineral lick on our smallest farm (35 acres).  Apparently a bachelor group of bucks has made this area their summer home.  We have seen this in the past and watched most of the bucks leave after the nearby crops were harvested.  Although one buck did return during the rifle season, his rack made a great set of rattlers.  We hope to hunt this area before the corn is harvested and during the rut.  We may even sit this area opening evening. Since the timber is small most of the mature buck activity occurs at night but maybe we can get lucky while the bucks are in their comfortable summer pattern.

~Joe Knochel~

August 20th:

With less than a month till the archery season opens, I can feel the excitement build!  Personally I am looking forward to a few hours without a cell phone, without emails, without deadlines.  Few things are refreshing like a breath of fresh air from a fall cold front.  I have dreams of the next wall hanger standing broadside at twenty yards, but that is not why I hunt.  I hunt to revive the soul.  The question I ask you is this; Would you still climb into your stand for the evening if you knew you wouldn’t see a deer?  If you said yes you share my anticipation for the 2011 deer season.

Here is a preview of what Rick and I are working on this year.  We plan to break our season into 5 parts:

1.        Early Season Food Sources (Sept 15^th-Oct 1^st).  Will another hit list buck fall?

2.        Exploration (Oct 1^st – Oct 25^th).  We have a few adventures lined up.   At this point the work may outweigh the reward but it should be fun!

3.        Rut (Oct 26^th – Nov 22^nd).  Hoping for better luck than last year.

4.        Alternative Weapons (Nov 23^rd – Dec 15^th).  The goal is to kill a deer (buck or doe) with a weapon we have not been successful with (traditional archery, traditional muzzleloader, hand gun, etc.).

5.        Late Season Food Sources (Dec 16^th – Jan 15^th).

Rick and I are looking forward to sharing our 2011 whitetail season with you.  I hope we inspire you to get into the field and enjoy “God’s country”, Missouri!

~Joe Knochel~

In only two weeks I will be in one of my stands waiting for a chance to harvest one of the numerous mature bucks that we have taken trail camera pictures of this summer.  Which stand will I be hunting from?  I probably won’t know that until the day before season starts, but I can tell you I’m going to be using my trail cameras to help pattern a shooter for opening day. 

Over the summer, my cameras have been busy taking pictures of deer using salt/mineral sites scattered across our property, and this has given me a good idea as to which deer are still around from last year and which up and comers have finally grown up.  Now, with season so close, I’m going to be moving all of my cameras to my hidey hole food plots to see which ones are getting hit during daylight hours by a shooter.  If this approach fails to produce a picture of a shooter on my food plots, then my opening day will likely be spent near a favored white oak tree as this year is the absolute best year I’ve seen for acorn production. 

~Korey Wolfe~

Food Plots & Trail Cameras,

Last weekend was a very busy weekend for our group in the southern part of the state as we planted the majority of our food plots for the year.  Long range forecast temperatures appear to start cooling down beginning next week so it seems growing conditions are gradually moving in the right direction.  On average our first frost will be somewhere between October 15^th and the end of the month so we should get 45 to 60 days of growth between now and then, depending on the rain!!

We have also been monitoring trail cameras in hopes of finding our (2) top hit list bucks, The Big 12 & Stretch.  As they often do, they have eluded our cameras so far this year.  We have gotten a few decent pictures of bucks, just not the ones we’re looking for.  I did get a chance to see and get some video of Stretch earlier in August.  He was a long way from me so it was hard to tell how much he has grown since last year but he is a shooter all day on our farms!!!  Hopefully we can get on these deer during season based on our history with them.  Instead of pushing them to try and get trail camera photos we will wait until we have Hoyt’s in hand to really go in after them.

~Darren Beck~