Would you check someone else’s trail cam?

[KrisKamm27]

Agreed Boneaddict, as much as I love having them I would love to see states make it illegal to run them on private during active seasons. Use em to scout and for inventory during the offseason, then pulled from the field.

Are you saying people will put them up on private land? If thats the case... and I was on my own property and found trail cams mounted... then those cameras would now belong to me. The old owner would come back and find a small sign mounted where their cam was that said. "Private property no camera's allowed. Make better choices"

[boneaddict]

I’m curious about how illegal it is to remove litter from public property. Some might think stealing, some might think cleaning up the woods, along with all the trash that often comes along with bait sites.  Again, have never done it, but have thought about it. 

TM, I try really hard not to contaminate other peoples set ups.   Some places I go I might run into 20 set ups.   My relaxing hike just became some sort of whatever.   I get filmed at the gas station, the grocery store, the stop light, I don’t feel like it at 6000 feet.   I am there to escape technology.   

[Feathernfurr]

Agreed Boneaddict, as much as I love having them I would love to see states make it illegal to run them on private during active seasons. Use em to scout and for inventory during the offseason, then pulled from the field.

I would disagree on this personally. Why does it matter if someone puts up a camera on a tree? Is it really affecting you?


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I think depending on the area and camera type it’s not impacting me, it’s impacting wildlife. I don’t have real numbers but I’d be willing to bet a month’s pay that harvests of mature bucks/bulls has seen a huge increase due to cell cameras. I think non cell cams in the backcountry are obviously less impactful. In areas that have service though, cell cameras are 100% unfair to game. He’s relying on his eyes, ears, nose, and wit to beat you. Humans are using those things plus satellite imagery, blinds/stands, long range rifles, high end archery equipment that has increased effective range, weather forecasting, in some extreme cases drones, hounds in some states. The ability to have 24/7 photo/video surveillance while actively pursuing an animal is just too much in my eyes.

[Feathernfurr]

Agreed Boneaddict, as much as I love having them I would love to see states make it illegal to run them on private during active seasons. Use em to scout and for inventory during the offseason, then pulled from the field.

Are you saying people will put them up on private land? If thats the case... and I was on my own property and found trail cams mounted... then those cameras would now belong to me. The old owner would come back and find a small sign mounted where their cam was that said. "Private property no camera's allowed. Make better choices"

Edited my previous post. I mean public not private.

[KrisKamm27]

I’m curious about how illegal it is to remove litter from public property. Some might think stealing, some might think cleaning up the woods, along with all the trash that often comes along with bait sites.  Again, have never done it, but have thought about it. 

TM, I try really hard not to contaminate other peoples set ups.   Some places I go I might run into 20 set ups.   My relaxing hike just became some sort of whatever.   I get filmed at the gas station, the grocery store, the stop light, I don’t feel like it at 6000 feet.   I am there to escape technology.

I know if you find illegal dumping sites there are numbers you can call to report it for cleanup. When I go on hikes around hamilton mountain or multnomah falls I always stuck a grocery bag in my pocket and come back down with bag of wrapper, cans and bottles to dispose of.

I did a summer on the PIKA project and was hiking out with a GPS trying to log Pika sightings and listening for them. It always surprised me that I could be 5 miles out in the middle of nowhere. Miles off trail and find soda cans or bottle that looked like they had been dropped that day. Never actually ran into anyone in the middle of nowhere but lots of evidence and trash indicating regular foot traffic.

[2MANY]

This thread's topic reminds me of another question/trap.

"Do these pants make my butt look fat"?

[Ridgeratt]

I have asked this before. When you are standing on the point of a ridge just how many cameras do you think are in the area?

Last fall my neighbor was going to check his cameras and ran into a bear hunter. Had a conversation with him, He said that he had over 2 dozen cameras out. My neighbor has over a dozen and if I had put any out the count would have been close to 5 dozen cameras in the one drainage. those are just the ones that the 3 of us admit to and who knows how many other folks thought they had found the honey hole?

[KrisKamm27]

I have asked this before. When you are standing on the point of a ridge just how many cameras do you think are in the area?

Last fall my neighbor was going to check his cameras and ran into a bear hunter. Had a conversation with him, He said that he had over 2 dozen cameras out. My neighbor has over a dozen and if I had put any out the count would have been close to 5 dozen cameras in the one drainage. those are just the ones that the 3 of us admit to and who knows how many other folks thought they had found the honey hole?

So if we go search ebay and find someone selling 50 gently used trail cams we knew where they found them 😆

[TimberMuleys]

Agreed Boneaddict, as much as I love having them I would love to see states make it illegal to run them on private during active seasons. Use em to scout and for inventory during the offseason, then pulled from the field.

I would disagree on this personally. Why does it matter if someone puts up a camera on a tree? Is it really affecting you?


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I think depending on the area and camera type it’s not impacting me, it’s impacting wildlife. I don’t have real numbers but I’d be willing to bet a month’s pay that harvests of mature bucks/bulls has seen a huge increase due to cell cameras. I think non cell cams in the backcountry are obviously less impactful. In areas that have service though, cell cameras are 100% unfair to game. He’s relying on his eyes, ears, nose, and wit to beat you. Humans are using those things plus satellite imagery, blinds/stands, long range rifles, high end archery equipment that has increased effective range, weather forecasting, in some extreme cases drones, hounds in some states. The ability to have 24/7 photo/video surveillance while actively pursuing an animal is just too much in my eyes.

I could see that, just in some areas like the buck I shot this year, the furthest I could see on the whole mountain was 50yds. And that buck only hit the cell cam 5 times in 5 months. And hit the additional 10 cameras I had out for him 0 times. I just don’t think setting out cameras “kills” that many deer. I think persistence and patience is what kills most big deer. My buddy had a whitetail on camera this year and I had the same buck (identical in lines and same unique massy areas) on camera 13 miles away just a few weeks later. I also had a bull moose on camera 65+ miles from where he was relocated to in 2020. Just because someone has a cell camera out, doesn’t mean they’re gonna kill anything, let alone big. I think they are an amazing tool for learning how animals use an area and get a feel for what animals are living there and their age class. However, if cameras were the “x-factor” for killing bug bucks/bulls, there would be WAY more big bucks and bulls dying every year. Both you and bone addict just complained about how many cameras are out, but I have never heard anyone complaining about too many big bucks and bulls dying to hunters in WA. I could see in some instances where the cell cameras could get excessive, but in places like I hunt, if cams get banned, there’s no glassing. It’s really the only efficient strategy to only pursue big, mature bucks and bulls in the thick timber. If there’s no cameras, people go in blind and shoot the first thing they get a chance at, which I believe leads toward less mature deer/elk.


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[KrisKamm27]

Slightly off topic but I'm curious. For the cam placement do you look at an Google maps and try to guess where the trails might be based on elevation and then set out a senty line of cams to build up an idea of how many deer are active in the area and what time of day they pass by and where they pass?  Then you get set up in a blind to make the shot as they pass by?     I remember my grandpas farm.. he has 80 acres half was fully forested and half was corn he left a gap between the fields and the forest.  But his dad had taught him to plant a narrow strip of corn right up along the edge of the forest.  So all summer long and into the fall the deer would get very comfortable working their way down along it and feel safe. They didn't cross the open area into the actual field.  Then when it was hunting season he would just go up into a tree stand and get a deer. I'm very curious about the mindset and planning of just finding likely areas and hoping for the best or if the conditions here require more leg work and cameras? Do you find that certain places are a good bet to get a deer year after year or do the deer shift their patterns and you have to adapt and stay in tune with the deer to consistently be in the right spot to bag one?

[TimberMuleys]

Slightly off topic but I'm curious. For the cam placement do you look at an Google maps and try to guess where the trails might be based on elevation and then set out a senty line of cams to build up an idea of how many deer are active in the area and what time of day they pass by and where they pass?  Then you get set up in a blind to make the shot as they pass by?     I remember my grandpas farm.. he has 80 acres half was fully forested and half was corn he left a gap between the fields and the forest.  But his dad had taught him to plant a narrow strip of corn right up along the edge of the forest.  So all summer long and into the fall the deer would get very comfortable working their way down along it and feel safe. They didn't cross the open area into the actual field.  Then when it was hunting season he would just go up into a tree stand and get a deer. I'm very curious about the mindset and planning of just finding likely areas and hoping for the best or if the conditions here require more leg work and cameras? Do you find that certain places are a good bet to get a deer year after year or do the deer shift their patterns and you have to adapt and stay in tune with the deer to consistently be in the right spot to bag one?

Very loaded question(s). Very dependent on type of area you will be hunting. Might be better off to ask that in its own discussion.


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[hunter399]

Slightly off topic but I'm curious. For the cam placement do you look at an Google maps and try to guess where the trails might be based on elevation and then set out a senty line of cams to build up an idea of how many deer are active in the area and what time of day they pass by and where they pass?  Then you get set up in a blind to make the shot as they pass by?     I remember my grandpas farm.. he has 80 acres half was fully forested and half was corn he left a gap between the fields and the forest.  But his dad had taught him to plant a narrow strip of corn right up along the edge of the forest.  So all summer long and into the fall the deer would get very comfortable working their way down along it and feel safe. They didn't cross the open area into the actual field.  Then when it was hunting season he would just go up into a tree stand and get a deer. I'm very curious about the mindset and planning of just finding likely areas and hoping for the best or if the conditions here require more leg work and cameras? Do you find that certain places are a good bet to get a deer year after year or do the deer shift their patterns and you have to adapt and stay in tune with the deer to consistently be in the right spot to bag one?

Very loaded question(s). Very dependent on type of area you will be hunting. Might be better off to ask that in its own discussion.


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Camera placement is critical.
You can put two cameras 1/4 mile apart.
Be night and day compared to what's on it.

[Rainier10]

I’d be more likely to take a sledge hammer to one than I would to check it.  I’m getting sick of side stepping them all over the place.  I go to the woods to get away from being recorded all the time. Tired of the damage caused by them etc.  I haven’t done either, just saying.

Were you the guy that checked my SD card and kept it?

Just kidding.

FYI this camera was on my private property. I was starting to really pattern a bear and a cougar using this trail.

[blackveltbowhunter]

Why does going in blind mean that you have to shoot the first critter you see? I hunt lots of areas with tight cover and nocturnal bucks ( till rut) that doesn't mean I am blasting every small buck or bull on the mountain.

I heard it summed up well on a podcast somewhere, a camera doesn't do much to help you find or kill a mature buck or bull, you still need to place it where those kind of animals live, and then hunt them correctly ( the discussion was not cell cam specific ) the real benefit lies in the fact that you don't have to waste time till the opportunity knocks to know what the critter is. Spending a whole season for an opportunity at a mature critter may take all season, if that buck is 155 or 190 there is no way to know and for some folks that can be defeating.   

  I don't mess with cameras. But tend to like bones outlook, I am pretty good about spotting them before they see me, but when they do I tend to be frustrated and cranky. Kind of spoils my good time.

  I do think if some of these guys could get on the same page, It might help long term. I mean in one drainage I found 4 cams this season, located owners of 2 (different ) at a trail head I never showed up on their cams, and they knew of at least one other camera owner. They were all chasing the bull I killed and had pics. Seems like they could have compared notes and saved a boat load of camera work and time. In some areas the camera density just gets really high and guys are all hunting the same critter IMO. Maybe not tho....

[hunter399]

I’ll be an anomaly in this one. I don’t really care if you check my cameras. If you’re in an area I’m hunting, you probably have cameras up and are seeing all the same things I see. Checking my camera is 1000x better than sabotaging it or stealing it.

I have checked one other persons camera in my life, about a decade ago, over a giant pile of corn in a state where you’re not allowed to bait. With that being said I hunt an extremely high pressure area for whitetails these days, and there’s about 10-15 guys that hunt it very hard. We’re all friends now, but I know for a fact that a good amount of those guys have checked other people’s cards.

This thread may give that idea that people don’t check other people’s cards, but I don’t think that’s the reality.

Personally I have no interest in checking someone else’s card these days. I wouldn’t hesitate to though, circumstantially. If I’m hunting private and no one else is supposed to be there, I’m checking it. If I’ve shot an animal and I were to cross a camera while I’m trying to recover the animal, I absolutely would check it.

I'm trying to grasp the reality of because your trying to recover an animal. It suddenly gives you more of a right to check someone's camera. Fire off a shot or two,yup I can check it now.... 😂

I also agree a tiny bit that reality is different than most response on this topic. Kinda the reason I own 200.00+ dollars in cable locks.
Have spent countless hours and weld wire putting lock boxes together.

Easy, I have a responsibility to do everything in my power to recover an animal. I big game hunt exclusively archery. Weird things happen, animals duck shots, broadheads don’t deploy, vegetation deflects arrows, a million other possibilities. I’ve blood trailed a couple hundred archery kills between my own and my core family/friend group. I’ve seen just as many that don’t make sense as I have that make sense. Case in point, this year I shot a WT that I was 100% certain was high and back. I backed out and gave the buck 12 hours with the thought that I had most likely hit liver, if anything lethal, despite good blood for the first 40 yards of the trail. In that time span, despite cold temps, we lost 3-4 inches of snow. The blood trail was almost completely gone, even the 40 yards that I had previously seen. Luckily we managed to follow some discolored snow and tracks to recover the buck in 110 yards with a double lung shot. However, had we not found him in that time span, and completely lost blood, we would have resorted to gridding/body searching. At which point, if I was to cross a camera that I thought potentially captured a photo of the deer I shot and given me any insight to the lethality of the shot, I would check that card.

But wouldn't it be your responsibility to setup your own camera.
If you make a bad shot , isn't that on you.