Sean Hall remembers checking his first home-built digital trail camera in January 2007.
"It was hilarious," said Hall, who lives in Cloquet. "I set the camera up 20 feet away and put a pile of cedar boughs down. I checked the camera the following week and had captured 320 pictures of a doe eating cedar boughs -- all taken in an hour and a half."
Hall, 42, has refined his trail-camera techniques since then. He has captured a wide range of subjects in all kinds of settings. His fourth annual "Tails from the Trail" calendar of high-quality trail camera images has just been published.
The calendar includes images of a black bear walking a log, drumming grouse, an otter, a beaver, a goose family, several deer and many other species.
Hall is a hunter and decided to try a trail camera after buying hunting land near Floodwood in 2003. When he got serious about it, he talked to Steve Fiske of Cloquet, who builds his own trail camera units using point-and-shoot cameras and remote triggering systems.
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Hall built his first unit in December 2006 with Fiske's assistance and decided he needed more. A lot more.
"I've got 14 units running now," he said.
HIGH-RESOLUTION CAMERAS
The majority of them are built from Sony cameras that he buys online, then customizes for trail camera use. Most of them are 6- to 12-megapixel cameras that produce high-resolution images.
Rather than just placing them near deer scrapes or mineral blocks, he puts them all over -- on beaver dams, near ponds, near grouse drumming logs and close to downed trees that an animal might walk along.
He gets 2,000 to 3,000 images a week now and deletes 95 percent of them. But what he keeps has changed the way he sees the woods.
"I've gained a lot of appreciation of wildlife and the outdoors," Hall said. "More than I already had. People rarely see bobcats. I get them on camera almost every week."
One series of three images he captured at three-second intervals shows a whitetail doe in a food plot, then a shot of the doe bounding away and three seconds later a wolf standing in front of the camera.
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BUILDING HIS OWN
Several commercially made trail cameras offer good results, but not the high-quality images that Hall gets. And it can be a lot cheaper to build your own camera system than buying commercial units, he said.
The key is buying good cameras -- Hall prefers the Sony brand -- online, where he can sometimes find discontinued models for as little as $15. He opens it up, connects wires to its circuit board from a remote sensor unit and packages it all in a sturdy waterproof case.
Total cost is typically about $225, he said.
He camouflages the case, secures it to a tree or a custom-made stake. He locks his units in place and checks them weekly.
Hall does encounter challenges. Bears, for instance. They sometimes chew on the cases. He's lost one camera to a bear.
Another challenge is remembering where he puts all his cameras.
"I had to start writing it down," he said. "And I also occasionally place them as waypoints on my GPS."
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He also has trudged all the way into the woods to check a camera only to discover he's forgotten the key to the lock. And he also has to be sure he has plenty of fully charged camera batteries and cleared memory sticks.
But all of the challenges are worth it when he discovers something he didn't expect to see on a camera, such as the black bear tight-roping a downed tree at the edge of a pond.
"I figured ducks would go up there and sit, but I've also seen owls, raccoons, woodpeckers and a bear balancing on that log. I never would have guessed that bear would walk across it."
