I’ve killed some good deer working scrapes over the years. However, it’s too random of visitation for me to spend much time on them, especially past the pre rut phase. I’ve been placing trail cameras(in video mode) on scrapes for the last several years and have seen mature bucks working/visiting scrapes in areas that I would’ve thought would only been visited at night. It’s been a fun and informative research project for myself. During this time, I’ve also placed cameras on nearby beds, that I figured to be buck beds. They were indeed buck beds and was able to capture some cool videos from them.
Yes! The best place to keep cams pre rut and post rut is on active scrapes. It will tell you a lot about who’s coming through. There’s a LOT of bucks that will visit an individual scrape.
Not all scrapes are created equal. A lot of them are made at night... visited irregularly... etc. This year I found one in the prerut that was different than the norm for me. It was in a place where a community scrape typically appears every year, but the difference this year was the size - it was the size of a truck hood. I put a camera on it and checked it after a week. I had 8-9 different bucks on camera with just about all of them making daylight appearances. Between three mature bucks, two 5+ and one 4 YO, there was usually one at that scrape every afternoon. Second time I pulled the card, about a week later, noted the same thing with even more frequent visits in the daylight. The following week, I killed one of the big boys - a 212 lb. 8 point that came to the scrape. Buy you several cheap Tasco cams - the ones that go for about $30 at WalMart and take 4 AA batteries. During November/early December, put them on scrapes that seem to be "hot"... check them every week or so and you might find one that's worth hunting over.
