We begin using trail cameras when our bucks first begin sprouting antlers in the spring and we don’t stop until the last shed antlers hit the ground well after the Illinois hunting seasons have ended. Running cameras helps us inventory our deer herd, track buck movement, and scout effectively with minimal human impact. Used correctly cameras are a tremendous deer management tool and at Hadley Creek we use them extensively.
Those of you who run trail cameras will appreciate that with the amount of free range acres we hunt it’s impossible to capture even a fraction of our bucks on camera. Add to that Illinois restrictions on using attractants and you’ll see how difficult it is to consistently get good buck pictures…and yet we go through many thousands of photos and only a very select few of the shooter buck pictures we capture make the cut for our Most Wanted Hit List page. Still, it’s worth the literally hundreds of hours of effort as we gain valuable management and hunting data and it lets us show you a small sampling of what’s waiting for you on a hunt at Hadley Creek.
