You said a mouthful there. Too often I'll find a hot new scrape and then agonize over whether I should move a camera off a known traditional scrape to see who is using this new one.I just can't talk myself into taking those cameras off scrapes- they are just so productive.
We see two distinct patterns in scrape initiation on my place. In a poor acorn year, it doesn't explode until early November, just around the opener of MZ (depending upon the date of opening day that year). But in a good acorn year, we see a massive surge of scraping in late October. Kills me not to be able to hunt then. Yeah, I know. I could take back up bow-hunting. But that will never happen!
Some of the most interesting black flash trail camera data I collected at Ames, was individual cameras on two different scrapes, that were literally 25-50 feet apart (essentially right beside each other in the big picture). More times than not, I would get completely different bucks on the cameras, with a few bucks messing with both scrapes, thus on both cameras. Don't ask me what that means, it just left me scratching my head. After I had it happen the first time, myself and my closest bud starting placing two cameras on nearby scrapes more often just to see, and sure enough, we'd get completely different bucks on scrapes that were less than 50 feet apart.
This situation was first documented by a doctorial student at UGA quite a few years ago. She was doing a study on buck scrape usage and put cameras on the first and last scrape of a long scrape-line. For any experienced observer, the scrape line looked like a line of scrapes being maintained by one buck, as each scrape was in view of the last. Yet the student found almost completely separate sets of bucks using the scrapes at either end of the scrape-line. That research project has always stuck in my head as I set up cameras. I never assume the same bucks are using a line of scrapes along a ridge-line, hence I often place cameras on different scrapes along the line. One isn't necessarily covering it.
I wrote off "scrape lines" many years ago. Our place has an incredible amount of terrain features. Not flat, not mountainous, just rolling primary and secondary ridges. I'm being honest when I say this, I don't really see any correlation to "scrape lines" with any particular buck and never really have. I just know the best spots that intersect and attract the majority of bucks. Sure, there are rub lines and scrape lines, but I mostly think they make them at random. Certain spots, however, in key terrain features and funnels really do have a meaning and attract most all the bucks in that particular area and a few roamers that just happen to travel through due to its uniqueness in terrain.
I see far more bucks simply "crossing" the ridgeline than walking along it.
Great suggestion, and that's exactly what I do (and I use Western Digital Passports too). Funny thing is, first one I bought was a Terabyte. I thought, "I'll never fill that!" Then came a 2-terabyte model. "Well I'll certainly never fill that!" Now I'm about to buy a 4-terabyte version! And that's just to hold trail-cam pictures and videos. Pictures don't take up too much space (until you get into the hundreds of thousands), but videos take up a HUGE amount of space, and I'm going all video with my trail-cams.
About 15,000 15 second videos per terabyte (around 75 MB each). 10,000 20 second videos, 20,000 10 second videos. Again, PER TERABYTE, so multiply by 4 for a 4 terabyte drive.
Most of the new ones are solid state. So no "disk" to go bad.
