Andr3wxmma wrote:Any other guys from SE Wi, can you explain to me why this is such an epidemic here?
I just got here last year and my only experience with something similar before WI in my 3 years prior of running cell cams was a brush hog eating one on Fort Drum land.
Last year mid season i got an angry text from another beast(i keep my name and number on all my cams to try and work with other hunters in the area) thinking i stole his SD card. In his defense my camera was right next to his ( i never saw his 15ft up in the tree) and i think i actually ran into the culprit opening day because when i was leaving the dude saw me coming down the trail by our cameras and flat out ran out of the woods. At the time i thought the other beast was just was an angry dude without common sense, like who leaves their phone number right by the seen of the crime? but now i know he was probably feeling the way i am now.
Fast forward to yesterday and i decided to go check A camera that have been unresponsive in that area and two that had died. I found that the unresponsive one someone had broke the latch and had taken my SD card and put a new SD in but the new one they put in was larger than the 32mb limit and slower than what the company recommends and it wasn't sending the pics to the app with it. I then decide to go check two other cameras that had died back in Mar but i didn't want to refresh the lithiums until around this time so they'll last until the season; both of these the python locks had been cut and the cameras were gone.
Now i'm 99% sure i have pictures of the SD card incident because the day the new card was put in i had photos of 2 younger guys in the remote area on another elevated camera. Do i setup a camera on the access to that spot and confront the culprits or do i just accept my losses and let this kind of behavior continue? I'm also not a big fan of plastering then on social media because they may have had a good reason that i dont know of yet. I also doubt they're the same person because why would they leave 1 cam but steal the others?
I think there's several factors as to why this is so prevalent. In no particular order...
1. People get jealous and angry when they think they found the perfect spot that nobody else knows about only to find a camera nearby.
2. The people stealing the cards or cameras have had it done to them enough times where they start justifying it in their head.
3. Many people are losers and are extremely unethical and immoral when they think nobody's looking.
4. Many people are losers and are extremely unethical and immoral when they think nobody's looking.
3 and 4 are similar.
Not sure why SE Wisconsin is worse than other areas you've hunted. I think the bow hunting craze is pretty strong around here and people get stupidly protective of "their" spots sometimes. Wish that was different. In all actuality, I hardly ever run into hunters. It's the deer I have a hard time running into around here.
I rarely hang trail cameras. I just don't want to deal with thieves. Their scumbags. If you're a grown man, you don't steal people's stuff.