VIDEO: Game Cameras Are Giving Homeowners An Extra Pair Of Eyes

OKTIBBEHA COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – Game cameras give hunters an extra pair of eyes.

Now, homeowners are finding a good use for them also.

Trail cameras spy on deer and other wildlife, but now people are using them to track thieves.

It’s just like the story we brought you on Monday, about a man being caught on one inside of a Winston County home.

They’ve been around for over a decade, camouflaged in the woods, but now they have a new hiding spot and target to capture.

“If somebody comes up to the house, at least now we’ve got a picture, hopefully a tag number, a description of a car, or the description of a person, and it really helps us. It gives us something to, you know, now we’ve got something to go on and even a timeline. They all have the little clocks and all of that on it,” says Oktibbeha County Sheriff Steve Gladney.

Homeowners are saving big bucks by putting trail cameras inside their homes, porches, and other spots on their properties.

It’s all to keep an extra eye on things while they’re gone, and to make sure there’s no unwanted house guests.

“We tell people too, all the time, especially if they’ve got equipment and things in their yard and they work during the day, and no one’s there, maybe have a long driveway that you cant see from the road, you know, we encourage them to put these cameras up.”

Sports Center hunting manager Slade Fancher says customers are on the hunt for the inexpensive cameras.

“Five or six years ago, everything was flash, white flash, so an intruder or whatever knew if you took a picture of them, but if you can hide this camera pretty good, and they’re infrared cameras so there is no flash, a little bit of a red glow, but you’d have to be looking right at it to see it, so you never know you got your picture taken.”

Although trail cameras can’t call 9-1-1 to report break-ins or live stream video, they do just about everything else that an actual home security system can do.

“Takes pictures, depending on what size memory card you put in it, it will hold 18 gigabytes up to a 64 gigabyte card, which will take five, six-thousand pictures, and you can set that to take a picture every five seconds, up to every five minutes.”

Those pictures can be the first step in helping bag a burglar.

“A lot of people are doing it, and you know, we’ve gotten some good pictures off of them and have actually caught people just because of these game cameras,” says Gladney.