Effect of Trail Cams on Game

[clacklin009]

Last year I bought my first trail cam and I enjoyed getting great pictures of animals. I bought a Moultrie 990i that is an infrared unit. As a have been researching I have found out the infrared is great for making it so humans don't see the flash from your camera but game will still be able to see the flash. I started to research after I had deer get scared by the camera at night and elk checking it out during the day. I'm wondering if anyone knows what effect cameras have on game travel and if they stop coming to an area with a camera there. I only left my camera out for 2 weeks so I wasn't able to get a feel for it. I was getting different elk every couple days and there wasn't a good pattern on any of them.

 

[packmule]

Scent is one factor, then shutter noise that will deter animals from their normal routine, but will say that humans can see those IR bulbs light up if they're looking right at it. I have several of the blackouts and the deer still peg their location. Even though I can't hear the shutter noise, they're sure able to pick it up.

 

[squirrelduster]

Every camera in elk country gets beat up. I had one cow lick all the camo paint off of a camera. I've had a couple of bulls rip them off trees.
It doesn't seem that cameras really affect the movements of the animals but checking the cameras too frequently sure does.

 

[Montana]

Don't want to hijack this thread because its a great question but I do have a quick related question.. I recently got a new trail camera and put it to the test against my old "favorite" camera. The new one had scary results like 14 vs 192 pics. So alarming that i knew something was up. So I swapped the sd cards and sure enough the numbers reversed. Any thoughts?

I am familiar with knowing that class 2 cards are the best for these cameras but not sure if some sort of reformatting is in order.

 

[packmule]

Reformat it and see. Make sure the camera takes that kind of card and size as well, some don't like the SDHC cards. (I had problems with Stealthcams doing that)