Trail Cam Tuesday - April 26, 2011

It is getting close to that time of year where most people start putting their trail cameras back out to get pictures of those early sprouting antlers as well as a few late season strutting turkeys. There is one animal that we are forgetting to mention, that I've had at least a few pictures of already this year, bears. After finding the first bear pictures no more than a week ago, I received a call from Jay yesterday talking about how opening morning of Spring Gobbler went and how a bear had already tore his camera down, this should be more than interesting to watch considering it was on video mode.This brings me what todays pictures are of and my tips to help prevent this from happening, I can't guarantee they work, but it has help my cameras stay on the tree and working.

Notice in #1 we see the bear browsing. He does that for a few pictures till something else catches his nose, as you can tell by #2 it's my trail camera, luckily though, he didn't rip it down. He just wanted to sniff it and play with it some as seen by the re-adjustment he gave it, marked by the red arrows in the #3 and #4. There are a few things that could have been done to easily avoid this. One way would be to put the camera in a "lock-box" that is thief and bear proof, but from what I have heard and read, neither of those are completely  true, but in the case of a bear making your camera a chew toy, something is better than nothing. The preventive steps I use are if you are feeding or putting out minerals make sure to place your camera first so that your hands won't be saturated with the odor of food, which will transfer to your camera. Then after that, even if you don't feed / use minerals, I spray my camera with a scent free spray that would normally be used to spray your boots and self down before entering the woods. The areas I cover with the spray is the body of camera (avoiding the lens), the straps and even the tree where I may have touched it and left my scent, this doesn't work all the time, but it has drastically dropped the number of pictures I've got of bears smelling and "playing" with my camera.

I might have forgot to follow my own rules one time while I was rushing to put my camera out. The result was Jay calling me asking where I put my trail camera, I responded, "On the tree where is always is." This time is wasn't there... 

It became a play toy, he found it 25 to 30 yards away from where it was placed. This is a fair warning make sure to be careful while placing those new trail cameras, so that it doesn't became some bear's new chew toy.

A picture of Jay as he was uncovering my trail cam from
where the bears had shoved it under some debris.