big buck | Whitetail Hunting

Whitetail Buck Shot Near Fredricksburg

The central part of Texas is know for high deer populations, but not necessarily big deer. But that may be changing. It looks like the Hill Country region of Texas is on the map and making history with a big whitetail buck! On Saturday, October 9th, a whitetail buck was shot near Fredericksburg, Texas, and is likely to become the new world record SCI typical whitetail buck.

The monster buck was harvest on the Bang Whitetail Ranch and the deer gross green-scored 253 2/8th inches gross. The big buck netted out at 250 1/8th inches. Now that is what I called record-breaking whitetail buck! In addition, biologist estimate the big deer to be only 4 1/2 years old.

I suspect this big whitetail is older that 4.5 years because deer that eat a lot of protein do not show as much tooth wear as deer that eat primarily native plant forages. Without natural tooth wear, it is even more difficult to age deer accurately. But age really does not matter at this point — it’s dead!

Big Kaufman County Whitetail Buck Harvested

Eric Minter with 27 Point Non-Typical Buck

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department game warden Eric Minter is living large. That’s because on October 21 he found himself as the lucky hunter staring down the buck of a lifetime from a Gorilla treestand hung high in a creek bottom filled with white oaks raining acorns. When all was said and done, it was Minter putting his own tag on a whopper 27-point non-typical Kaufman County buck. There is no official green score number on the multi-tined monster yet, one look at the photos from the buck would lead one to believe that this deer will score well above the 200-inch mark on the non-typical side of the Boone and Crockett scoring sheet.

“I’ve been kind of leery of telling everybody just yet because I don’t know what he scores and I don’t want to guess and it be a lot lower or higher than I expected,” Minter said. “But this is unbelievable.” Some observers who have looked at the whitetail think it’s possible that the Minter buck could potentially challenge the existing Pope & Young Club state record non-typical in Texas, a 225 7/8 inch buck taken by bowhunter Jeffery L. Duncan on the Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge back in 2001. Not bad for Minter’s first bow buck. Continue reading Big Kaufman County Whitetail Buck Harvested

Minnesota’s Camp Ripley Produces Monster Buck

Camp Ripley produces another monster whitetail

When it comes to great whitetail hunting, Minnesota has a reputation for producing some great monster bucks. Although the current nontypical record is over 225 inches, resident Scott O’Konek did his best to threaten that record. And it sounds sad to to say he came up short, because he bagged one heck of a big buck, but his deer did not make the cut. However, I would have a smile a country mile wide if I had even seen this great deer, much less tagged it after putting a well-placed arrow through it.

Source: Scott O’Konek may have rewritten the Minnesota record books when he tagged this 32-point buck around 9 a.m. on Oct. 15, the first day of Camp Ripley’s annual two-day archery hunt. Bolstered by good mass and long brow tines, the big deer’s green score—conservatively measured at 228 nontypical—would be more than enough to dethrone the current state-record archery buck, ~~a 222 5/8 nontypical taken in 1992 by Gary Martin~~ a 226 3/8 nontypical taken in 2008 by Ben Spanjers. O’Konek’s deer weighed 192 lbs. field dressed, and the highly symmetrical rack netted 183 7/8 typical.