MuleyMadness Hunting Forums

Nice pics Derek, yea those Elk love to mess with the cams. To bad some crazy guy is messing with it, on private property no less. :(

74Toad wrote:Those are some great shots. I have been wanting to get into putting some trail cameras out, but I am having a hard time deciding what ones are going to be the best. It looks like the ones you have shoot a good picture at night. Thanks for posting.

I have 2 Primos & 1 Moultrie (an older GamepSpy model). I love the 2 Primos, they seem to run forever on 4 D batteries. I only have to change them out once per summer... unless one malfunctions or some guy changes the settings to video to chew up my battery. The Primos are inexpensive (less than $80 on Amazon). I can't justify spending several hundred $$$ on something to strap it to a tree & walk away. The infrared flash does a good job at night, although other models with more LEDs would likely provide better pictures... but these are suficient for me (unless a cow elk sneezes on the lens). I don't like the white light flash, no real opinion/reason as to why... I just don't.
The Moultrie uses a big 6V battery & even with the flash turned off I only get 2 weeks on one battery, so I don't put that one out a whole lot anymore. Takes decent pics though.

I did notice one other thing when I was retrieving the first camera way up at the top of the bowl... I noticed some strange marks on the tree that my camera was on and also the tree in the center of the cam pics. Some look like claw marks (3 or 4 straight equally spaced marks), but others looked like rubs from antlers (kind of a back & forth, up & down pattern to them). I hadn't noticed them before & will try to take some close-ups when I take a camera back up there... but here's a pic from the trail cam so if anybody has any thoughts as to what is making these marks let's hear it (yeah, I forgot to set the date again, too).

Here's round #3, it's only been a week but got some good shots (but still NO BUCKS!):






Here's a new placement from my camera that malfunctioned the previous 2 times (which worked great this time... go figure). This camera got moved as well, a cow elk got friendly with it & turned it so the last 200 hundred pics were of a twig.




Then there's this one with the mystery creature... coyote, cougar, quadrepedal yeti?

Sweet pics man. What's that of in your very last pic?

I don't know, your guess is as good as mine... I'm thinking either a coyote or a young mountain lion (because the tail is so short)

Good looking pics! How long will the elk hang around on your place?

therookie wrote:What's that of in your very last pic?

After Googling a couple pictures of coyotes & lions... I'm going to say it's a mountain lion. Coyote's tails are bushier while a lion's tail is more "sausage" like. I'd say the tail in the picture is sausage like.

waspocrew wrote:How long will the elk hang around on your place?

I don't know... we didn't even know the elk were in there until last fall during the muzzleloader hunt when I saw a spike & cow. I would expect that they will scatter during the rut. I'm just hoping that they group back up and come back to the area to feed post-rut. Maybe somebody with more elk knowledge could help me out with what these bulls may or may not do.

I would say mountain lion too, based on the tail and body.

Nice and thanks for showing, and I'll go with yote.

Nice shots. I would be sitting in some of those spots when opening morning came along, that much I can tell you