More than just a method to help decide where to hang a stand, trail cameras have become year-round tools for land managers of every description. Too, in the past few years, technology and the marketplace have made trail cameras both more reliable and easier to use. The results have given deer hunting enthusiasts insights that have made a major difference in how they plan for opening day and the days and weeks that follow while the season’s in.

That’s a difference Cody Kuck (pronounced “cook”) has taken to heart. Heading into his fourteenth fall as owner and operator of Heartland Pride Outfitters, he and his team have long since come to rely on information gleaned from summertime trail-camera surveys. Much more than just a tool for mere “inventory,” photos revealing a long, hot summer’s antler growth give them both a starting place and a sense of urgency, letting them know what bucks are best targeted and when.

Get to Know Your Deer (Year-Round)

Based in Bertrand, Nebraska, the Heartland Pride Outfitters team puts clients on deer in the panhandle and south-central parts of the state, as well as in northwestern Kansas. Across acre after acre of the nation’s breadbasket, bucks on their properties grow and thrive.

“Improvements in the trail-camera game have greatly improved our world,” Kuck says. “When we started, we were shooting 10 to 25 rolls of 35mm film a night. Then we’d take it to the one-hour photo lab and wait to see what we had. Now, we’re able to wake up and have last night’s photos waiting for us on our phones. We can wake up, grab a cup of coffee, and start downloading. It’s Christmas morning every day around here, now.”

The haunts and habits of whitetails differ in the summer from the fall and winter, of course, but following the deer all year long has helped Kuck learn key details that have led to a lot of success.

“One thing I like about the summer inventory over the last two to three years is that we’ve been able to confirm we have a different inventory in September and October than we do in November and December,” he says. “We start putting out trail cameras for the summer around June 20, and that won’t stop until Christmastime. Being able to have 20 to 50 trail cameras out at any given time in one camp is a tremendous asset. We know going into the preseason and pre-rut phases what’s there. We know the bachelor groups will break up and some will disperse onto the neighbors’ property. But by following them all summer long, we’ve been able to learn which bucks run with which other bucks and, of those, which tend to spend the latter part of the season somewhere else. Of any group of four bucks, usually at least two will go off onto the neighbors’, so, in that case, we try to target earlier the bucks most likely to leave. If they’ve tended to chase does onto the neighbors’ in November, we know we need to hunt them specifically in September and October.”

Finding good deer photos means first finding the deer and, for Kuck in the summer, that means targeting water tanks. In his case, that often means tanks he and his operation set up intentionally to help the health of the herd in the first place.

“Some of our properties are all pasture ground with no crick or river bottom, so we’ve set up water tanks we’ll run through November to help the deer stay healthy. We want to know that, even when they’re rutting, they’re staying hydrated.”

From bachelor groups of bucks to healthy does and fawns, using trail cameras during the summer to monitor your whitetail herd will help you be better prepared for hunting seasons later in the year.