Trail Camera Inventory

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of maintain a mineral site is placing using your trail cameras to inventory the bucks using the mineral site and watching them grow throughout the spring and summer. It’s very rewarding to watch not only bucks, but does and fawns as well, utilize the minerals you’ve placed for them and incorporate said minerals into their daily routine. Not to mention, if your trail cameras have video mode, like many offered in the Stealth Cam line, then you can watch deer interact with one another at the mineral site. Video mode can be extremely beneficial when capturing bucks because you can learn a lot about his personality, aggression levels, and social status.

A wealth of information can be learned about your deer herd when you incorporate trail cameras into your mineral station game plan. Trail cameras that have video mode, such as those made by Stealth Cam, further enhance the educational value.

I’ve had great success working mineral sites and trail cameras together during the summer to gain a better understanding of what deer are using my property during the summer. I also use the information I gather from the photos to determine how many does I should try and harvest off the property the following fall, and what the fawn recruitment rate is for the particular year. Logging all of this data into a journal or spreadsheet will further enhance the benefits from running trail cameras and mineral sites together.

Conclusion

With June just around the corner, it’s certainly not too late to start your first mineral site. If you’ve already started one, then don’t forget to properly freshen it up throughout the summer to ensure deer continue using it. Minerals and mineral sites provide a deer hunter and manager with a plethora of information and intelligence that can make us better hunters and stewards of the land, and it’s something I recommend everyone who has the ability to give them a try. At the very least, it’s a fun way to kill time until fall arrives. And after all, isn’t that what we’re all waiting for anyway?