Trail Cameras

[Mark Christianson]

I wish I could limit the food my feeder puts out. Holy dump. The animals almost make me have to take out a second mortgage. I just have a home made hopper with a tray on the bottom. It holds over 500 lbs of corn at a time, and it doesn't take a long time to empty it out.

At work I feed the deer as well. In the dead of winter, I put in two 5 gallon buckets pretty much each night. Thats around 50 lbs, and yes, they clean it out in a night many times. I have lots of great pics, cuz I hang a camera on the feeder there as well. No true Monster bucks, but several very respectable ones over the last few years.

PS - enough nice bucks that 2 guys got busted by the DNR a couple years ago I guess within eyesight of the building. Sad but true.

[BLACKJACK]

biglake, your example of going thru a ton of corn is why I'm contemplating a timed feeder. In the past I've put out several pheasant feeders made out of hardware cloth with shelled corn in it and the deer can clean up 100 pounds in a week. I do have a timed feeder that you attach to a bucket, then put up in a tree, but its small, if I attach it to a bigger barrel, I'm afraid I won't be able to pull it up.... Like the idea of your trail camera and feeder station though!!

[BLACKJACK]

Dan, I was just out looking at my Cabelas catalog. Lots of options on feeders with tripods! How do you fill yours, haul a stepladder out there? Any problem with deer knocking it over?

[Perch Jerker]

18 inch Crappie,

Thanks for the heads up on the $50 MC-2 cameras.

I used one in late Sep for bear hunting and it worked great. I plan on having about 5-6 hunters this coming fall instead of just one so I'll rotate the two cameras (1 green & 1 camo to tell them apart) to the 6-7 baits depending on how they're getting hit. I'm kind of the ring leader for the newly created 'Bear Camp' since I've been hunting them for 9yrs.

I only use the trail cameras for bear hunting in warm weather and check them at least once a week (every 7-4 days) so battery life & date stamps are not important, but the time stamp is.

I'll post some pics when I get the chance.

PJ

[Dan Wood]

Yea, I was going through too much corn without the feeder.. those deer can finish off 100 lbs. of corn pretty quick if they have it available to them...

I have the tripod that comes with the On Time feeder... It isn't the greatest, but it hasn't tipped or anything yet. It has 3 sections to get it about 9' in the air. I only use 2 of the sections and have it up about 6'. At 6' I can get the corn into it without a ladder. If you went 9' you would need a ladder to fill it. 6' seems to be high enough, they go under it without any problem. It would spread the corn out more up at 9' I'm sure. At 6' it spreads maybe a 10-15' diameter or so, which is enough for the area that I have it in..

[mdeiley]

We have skipped the tripod and hung the barrel from a tree branch with a pully on it. Then we attach a boat winch to raise and lower the barrel for filling. Works good if you have a large enough tree close to where you want the feeder. I would think you could mount a similar set up to the tripods as well. We also found if the deer can reach the spreader on the bottem of the barrel they will hoof the heck out of it. We needed to replace ours about once a year. Maybe lower is better.

Sorry not real trail timer topic.