Soaker cameras may be the tactic that is most responsible for saving me time. Now is the time of the year to deploy them.
A ‘soaker’ camera is what I call a non-cellular camera that I will use to identify whether a spot is worth spending hunting time on or not. I put these on new spots that I had previously scouted in the spring/summer. Before I really hammered down on being efficient with my hunting time, I would have scouted those spots in the spring and just went out to sit them, hoping for the best.
Times have changed.
I do not want to spend time hoping that something will walk by; I want to know that I have a legitimate shot (no pun intended) at a target deer every time I go out. Thus, I now will hang non-cellular cameras on them all season without actually hunting them. I want those cameras to ‘soak’ so I can understand what happens in that spot with 0 hunting pressure (from me, anyway).
These properties are part of the Property Funnel I use to maximize my access to property. In my spring scouting, I usually identify anywhere from 2-5 spots that look promising and mark them on my map. Again, I’m trying to narrow down the absolute best spot in the property. I wait until the time is right to find the hottest sign to hang cameras.
That time is now.
Early-to-mid October scrapes and rubs are the best time to identify not only likely buck behavior but also doe behavior. Scrapes that are actively hit hard in this time frame are usually the community scrapes that occur year after year and that every deer on the property will use at different times. These are slightly different than pre-rut scrapes because pre-rut scrapes may haphazardly be made by testosterone-rising bucks in areas where they may not make them next year due to chance.
This intel is vitally important to get now because it helps me avoid chasing my tail this year. Hopefully, after all of the different places I have to put out soaker spots (which, this year, is about 12 different spots on 4 different properties), I walk away with 1-2 spots that next year I will actively hunt. Effectively, I’m going weeding out where to look at the most possible recent intel.
I’ll give you an example of how this process saves me time. One morning this past week, I went to check out one of these spots to hang one or two cameras. In the spring, I had identified two scrape areas that I marked to come back and inspect in the fall with the intention to hang non-cell cameras. I thought that one scrape area was absolute dynamite and the other was promising but not as good as the first.
The first spot was a transition out of a major swamp onto a hogback ridge made from strip mining 100 years ago. This public land spot now held a nice oak ridge. There was a nice old scrape right at that transition line. I could picture bucks over the years using that scrape over and over. I also had nice buck pictures a quarter mile north this spot from past soaker spots.
The secondary location I found was on my way in to walk the hogback swamp transition about 200 yards away. I circled the swamp on the sry land and found a couple of scrapes in a crab apple thicket. I dropped a pin because it was definitely of interest, but didn’t get me as fired up as the first. In the past, I would have headed straight for the hogback swamp transition and just hoped for the best.
It was clear, however, that the crab apple thicket was the dynamite spot to be in. Because I went in mid-October and not closer to the pre-rut, I could identify which scrapes were more likely to be ‘community’ scrapes and which were not. The hogback scrape wasn’t even touched. The crab apple thicket had multiple scrapes and nice rubs.
I didn’t even waste time on the swamp transition. I now have a non-cell camera in the crab apple thicket. Now all I need to do is be patient for January to come back and see whether this spot is worth actively hunting next year.