Woman Lifestyle

Every season, a lucky hunter bags a deer and utters the phrase, “I’ve never seen this buck before.” Technology has made it easier than ever to track and pattern your deer herd’s movements. With temperature, moon phase and even barometric pressure readings, the latest scouting cameras give you the information you need to pattern your deer. The tricky part is getting your deer in front of that camera. You can’t just strap a digital trail camera to a tree and think it will do the work for you. You need to attract your bucks to the area in front of your camera, and that takes some upfront planning.

So you want to build your own deer camera? The advantages of using a digital camera for your deer camera are great. You dont have to buy film, and you dont have to pay for processing. Plus you always pay more because you absolutely have to get the 1 hour photo because your so excited to see whats on there, and thats twice as much. It doesnt take long for that film and processing to add up to enough to pay for a digital setup. The setup I just built is more of an experienced builder type camera, but you follow the same basic steps which i will outline here.

First step is to buy your materials. For digital deer cameras, i prefer to use the Sony DSC-P41 camera. The advantage to these cameras are the picture quality, battery life, and power-on time. Averaging 5 pictures a day, the camera batteries will last 2 weeks or more. I have my camera set up on a feeder and usually get 20 or more pictures a day, and the batteries will last around 5 days.

You can pick up these digital cameras at Walmart on clearance ( most of them are already gone) or you can usually find good deals on ebay. I got my last one for $130, list price was around $300 new.

The second thing you need is a camera control board and camera trap. There are manufacturers of boards, though i only have experience with 2. The manufacturers that i recommend are Pixcontroller and Snapshot Sniper. Pixcontroller has 2 different boards available depending on the options you want. Both of thier boards are dip-switch programmable for different cameras, delay time, night/day, and video capture. They range in price from between $40-80 for the board alone, but are also available in kit form (recommended) so you have most of the supplies you need.

Snapshot Sniper only carries one type of board, but in 2 different versions. One has the motion sensor on the front, and one has the motion sensor on the back, depending on which way you want to mount it. The thing i really like about the SS board is that instead of dip-switches, it has an LCD screen with on-screen programming, which is very easy and convenient to use. The Snapshot Sniper boards are around $40 and do not come in a kit form, but all the supplies will be listed below. We will be using the Snapshot Sniper board for this project.

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