Trail cameras are an invaluable information gathering tool for deer hunters, they tell the story of the deer and give you a look into their habits and home range.

On Halloween morning I was fortunate enough to connect on a mature 9 pointer in Westchester County. It’s my biggest buck and a buck my brother didn’t know he had on trail camera until he pulled a card from a card on another property a few days after I arrowed the buck (you can read the story on NY Antler Outdoors and NYBowhunter.com).

The day I arrowed this buck you could just tell his testosterone was through the roof. Every tree in sight was being rubbed and torn to shreds. He was looking for a doe – or a fight. The trail camera pictures from the day before I shot the deer show him trailing a doe and looking for love. It was a sure sign that the bucks were losing their patience and the rut was about to get underway.

What’s really interesting about these pictures is that they’re not from the same property we were hunting on Halloween morning, but a different neighborhood that the woodlot we were hunting connects to. The buck was over 700 yards away from where I ended up getting a shot at him. Just goes to show you how big the home range of these animals are – even when we’re hunting tiny suburban woodlots.

A lot of times I wonder where these bucks that show up on trail cam in the summer ‘disappear’ to, but the truth is these deer have home ranges much larger than the size of the woodlots I have permission to hunt. It was cool to get these pictures of my buck and get a little idea of how he was using the land. Its information we can use to our advantage next year as we try to put another mature buck on the ground.

Trail cameras allow me to pinpoint when bucks are moving and tell me which stands to hunt and what times to hunt them.

On Sunday, October 6th at 6:38 pm this big-bodied, heavy antlered whitetail walked within 20 yards of my stand. This is a Pennsylvania buck so there’s no hunting on Sunday and he seems to know this. The good news was it motivated me to stick it out on the stand for the rest of the week – the bad news was after 25+ hours on the stand I only saw one deer and it was a spike at last light.

Just in case you didn’t miss deer season enough, here are a few pictures I got from one of our reader’s Chris at the end of last season.

During a hurricane, Sandy Chris’s ladder stand and the tree had become victims of Sandy and were lying on the ground. Instead of taking the stand and moving it to another location, Chris decided to come back at the end of the season to get the stand.

For the remainder of the season, Chris hunted a few other stands and ended up with a nice eight pointer.

Chris forgot about a trail camera he placed early in the season out in Suffolk County and when he finally checked the camera he was surprised to find two big whitetails that made it through the season – a wide six-pointer and a super nice ten pointer.

There were 868 pictures on the camera and many of the pictures were from days when Chris was hunting another stand just 150 yards away. Sometimes that’s how hunting goes, but at least Chris will have something to look forward to next fall!