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Prehistoric Trail Cam

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Hunter 257W

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I found a few of these old TrailTimer brand early forerunners of trail cams in my dresser today and thought some of you might like looking at the earliest electronic attempts to pattern deer. I recall buying about 5 of these at something like $4 each. They were extremely crude. They have a cheap clock in the box that stops when the cable tie that you can see on the right side is pulled out by a deer walking by. The deer pulls the cable tie out because you tie a piece of sewing thread to the cable tie and stretch it across a trail. Obviously something other than a deer could do the same and also obviously it was a one shot deal being able to time only 1 event. In practical terms, it was pretty much useless. :) They came out with a larger one a few years later that looked very much like present day trail cams that had an IR sensor and 5 clocks that allowed you to time 5 "events". You still had no proof any of them were a deer. A camera is so much better but this is how it started for those who may be interested!


 
Yep. Pretty much useless, but I spent some time using them, too. It was a novel idea at the time. I remember using them on bear baits in Canada ---- they did have a little value for that, maybe. :)
 
Yeah, I was trying to recall about when they came out. I got my FFL in 1988 and at that time started getting wholesale sporting good catalogs which is where these were coming from. I'd guess I bought them sometime around 1990 or thereabouts. It was probably mid 1990's when the IR version came out followed by the 1st actual cameras with film. My 1st film camera was stolen in 2008 and I bought it in December 2004. I don't think they had even been available before 2000, had they? What's the earliest date anybody recalls buying an actual trail cam?
 
You have got to be kidding me.

Who made that thread about coincidences????

I was laying in bed this morning thinking about moving one of my cameras and I SWEAR I was thinking about that very thing and was going to post in here this morning if anyone remembered them !!! :eek:
 
I still have one of the first electronic trail-timers (the first one that actually worked!). It's a TrailMaster TM1500. It used a light beam instead of a string. The only downside was, it didn't tell you WHAT broke the beam, just that something had broken the beam. They even made a little printer you could plug into the Timer that would print out all of the times the beam had been broken.
 
I didnt have a camera when I started hunting, but what I had done was find some definate trails where deer had been moving, creeks crossings and such, then I would put some 2lb fishing line along the trails, creek crossing. Pull it so tight that almost anything would break it. I would set them in the evenings, then check it in the mornings, it not broke I would check them in the middle of day.
until I could figure out some type of pattern, took a while and NO it wasnt very accurate either but narrowed down a bit anyway.
 
So I wasn't the only nut who was buying these?! That's good to know. Back then I never ran into anybody else who even knew these devices existed. My main frustration with them was the fact that I was trying to pattern deer in row crop farm country with limited woods and the fields had many many trails leading into them. Deer could come from anywhere and these timers could only cover the short area that you could stretch a string across. The only conclusion I came to after using them one Summer/Fall was that deer movement was too random around here to ever see a pattern using such a device.
 

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