With the first day of summer only a few days behind us and
my Facebook and Twitter blowing up with trail camera pictures, it made me want
to revive an old favorite of mine. If you have been following this blog for awhile, you know about Trail Cam Tuesday (TCT), a series of posting regarding
interesting trail camera pictures I have been taken and am currently receiving
from Foggy Mountain and the surrounding areas. Though I had not been writing
with the same frequency recently, I have not forgotten about my trail cameras.
I still run them religiously; the only difference is they are not getting
checked as frequently, yet this could be good thing. Over winter a few
interesting pictures had surfaced, but nothing that made me think I have to
post a new TCT. This past week, I found the set of pictures that made me think I
needed to revive this series.
The potential for checking your trail cameras less
frequently gives the animals less of a chance of patterning you and your
behaviors while checking your cameras. This lets them move more freely and
naturally throughout the given area without fear and or scent of humans. Yet
and this this a big one, it also can have a counterproductive reaction if your
camera(s) is placement wrong, is not seeing the activity you are trying to
capture, the batteries die, or the overall pattern of movement has
changed. That’s where I was over a month
ago; I have gone from checking trail cameras from at a minimum of once a week
to now possibly once a month. I knew that the pattern of deer movement had
changed some due to downed trees and other obstruction in the normal routes
since last year’s “Super Storm” and surrounding properties recently being
timbered. Finally a few weeks ago I decided I needed to move one of my cameras
from a location it had been at for multiple years, since before the creation of
this blog. Granted it only moved 50 to 75 yards away, but did it make a huge
difference.
As I said before, my Facebook especially has been flooded
with picture of potentially great looking bucks in velvet. I won't lie, I was
hoping to find a few of those in my pictures since moving my main trail camera
set, but that was not the case. As I switched out my cards and threw the old
one into my camera to view it, I saw a lot of doe movement on this trail at
various hours of the day. This was good to see, but still not what I was hoping
for. I did not think much of and threw my camera into my backpack and carried
on with my plans for the rest of the day. Not until I got home that night and
transferred the pictures to my computer did I look at the pictures again and
see what I truly had. One of the does that was walking though had something
following it. Something small enough that I couldn't pick it up on the small
camera screen. It was a small fawn, with its vibrant white spots. Although this
is not a giant buck I can chase this fall, it might been in another few years
or it may be just another doe to help repopulate the mountain top and keep the
great deer herd thriving.
It’s not always about the antlers, sometimes you have
to step back and enjoy the simple things in nature.
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