Deer of Year 2011

The string of fabulous whitetails shows that North Carolina is capable of producing trophy racks from almost every corner of the state.

As a magazine that tries to discover and present to its readers the most-impressive deer killed in the Tarheel State each year, North Carolina Sportsman closely monitors the annual white-tail harvest.

Over the past three seasons, it’s been hard not to notice the number of tremendous 8-point bucks taken by North Carolina hunters. We’ve been waiting for that cresting wave to break into the next level with a boxcar load of 10- and 12-pointers.

A handful of factors, including voluntary hunter selectivity and the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission’s two-buck rule that took effect in 200, the Old North State appears to be on the cusp of being regarded as a great place to go kill a trophy. By almost any measure, deer hunters will agree that the 2011 season produced an extraordinary number of high-scoring bucks.

While we can’t imagine telling a youngster his 4-pointer isn’t a trophy — we still remember when we bagged our first antlered deer — for seasoned hunters, the bar usually is set a little higher. This issue attempts to present as many hunters as we could find who cleared that bar in 2011.

You’ll read about oddities as well, including the two lake wardens at Burlington’s Lake MacIntosh — one serving Alamance County and the other working at Guilford County — who each killed a trophy buck in different counties. One of those may be the highest-scoring whitetail taken in North Carolina last season.

Excluding any buck already featured in the magazine, the county-by-county breakdown shows Rockingham County with three bucks in this roundup, Guilford and Surry counties with two each, and one each from Alamance, Warren, Caswell, Person, Orange, Lincoln, Harnett, Yadkin and Wake.

Anyway, we hope our readers enjoy these stories of how hunters harvested some of the state’s highest-scoring deer of 2011. We also believe many of the 8-pointers that survived 2011 are lined up to have their photos taken in 2012.

Huge non-typical shot in Alamance

The verdict is in, and there’s no doubt about it — the biggest, nastiest bucks are coming from North Carolina’s suburbs.

Steve Shaw of the village of Alamance, who works as the warden on the Guilford County side of Lake MacIntosh, is one of the prime witnesses for the prosecution.

On Dec.12, while hunting along a creekbottom just outside the Graham city limits, he shot a buck that looks like it wandered 1,000 miles south from Canada just in time for the season. The 18-pointer carries headgear that looks like it belongs to some giant Northern non-typical.

“I hadn’t seen a single deer in this block of woods in the last 10 hunts there, but my friend, Chris Faircloth, convinced me we should go that day,” said Shaw, who carried a .50-caliber muzzleloader instead of a rifle because of the number of homes in the area.

“It’s a high-traffic area, and I never have hunted with a rifle in there, only a bow or muzzleloader,” said Shaw, 37, who was about to unload his .50-caliber CVA Mag Hunter as dusk fell around 5:15 p.m. But from his stand, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye and saw a deer in the creekbottom.

“He was 60 or 70 yards from me,” he said, “and quartering away from me, but I hit him behind the right shoulder.”

The buck ran toward Faircloth and bedded down about 50 yards from him. Faircloth and Shaw walked toward each other and easily found the big buck. Both were amazed at the size of its headgear and the number of tines, odd points and drop tines.

“The rack is a non-typical 18-pointer with five drop tines on the left side and one on the left (main beam),” Shaw said.

Burlington taxidermist Chuck Ganthos scored the rack at 186¼ gross Boone-and-Crockett inches and 176 5/8 net non-typical inches.

Word quickly spread, and Justin Henderson, who hunts the adjoining property, called Shaw and asked if the deer had a bullet wound in its shoulder. Shaw said it did, and Henderson said he’d shot the deer Dec. 10 but couldn’t find it.

The buck’s right main beam totaled 22¾ inches, with tines measuring 8, 11½ and 7½ inches. The left main beam is 18 5/8 inches with tines measuring 6 3/8, 11 and 8 inches. The inside spread is 16 inches and the outside 24 4/8. The right beam had there abnormal points totalling almost 13 inches, and the lefthad seven abnormals, two longer than five inches and two more seven inches or longer.

“I put trail cameras up either Oct. 15 or 16, but I didn’t have this buck on any of the images,” Shaw said. “I don’t know where he came from.”

Amazing non-typical falls in Surry County

Josh Simpson of Pilot Mountain knows the importance of being in the woods — even better, making an effort to get into the deer woods — in bagging a trophy buck.

“I didn’t do much of anything special,” he said. “I was just trying to go to my stand early because it was during the rut, the moon was full and I felt like deer would be moving.”

Simpson, 38, was headed to a farm he’d hunted for years on Nov. 10, the first week of the Northwestern Zone muzzleloader season.

“I have a long road I have to walk down to get to my stand, and I parked my truck at about 2 p.m.,” Shaw said. “I’ve hunted this land all my life. It’s in the Ararat River Valley, and everybody knows a river valley is a good place to find deer.”

Once Simpson parked his truck and grabbed his Thompson Center Omega in-line muzzleloader, he started down the road toward his stand. That’s when a buck with a stunning set of headgear jumped into the road..

“He stood there, lookin’ at me,” Simpson said. “I only knew he was a shooter; I didn’t have time to study his rack.”

He threw up his rifle, peered through the scope, aimed at the buck’s right shoulder, pulled the trigger and leveled the buck.

“I ran up there and got a better look at his antlers,” said Simpson, who was astounded by what he saw — a rack with tines going in every direction.

“I couldn’t move,” Simpson said. “I was in La-La Land.”

Simpson loaded the buck into his truck bed, called his brother, Dale, and met him at a local farm-supply store.

“I’m always tell everyone (in his family) when they ask when I go huntin’ if I got a deer that ‘Yeah, I killed a 12-pointer,’ so I called my wife — and she didn’t believe me,” he said. “Then I called my dad and my brother and they said, ‘You’re full of it.’ Nobody believed me until they saw this deer.”

At Mike Johnson’s archery and fishing shop, the owner counted 28 tines and abnormal points, but only 25 scoreable, including double drop tines and a split double drop on the right main beam. Billy Allen of Allen’s Taxidermy in Shoals is preparing the rack for display at the 2012 Dixie Deer Classic.

“I don’t know the score of the rack,” Simpson said. “Nobody knew how to score a rack like this.”

Greensboro area gives up trophy whitetail

Without a doubt, northern Guilford County contains its share of trophy bucks, but who’d expect one to come from almost inside the Greensboro city limits?

On Nov. 26, Will Burris of Summerfield was sitting in a children’s tree house his dad had built just across the road from The Cardinal, a golf course development.

“He’d always told us we should hunt out of it, but I never did until that day,” he said.

Burris, 21, was in the tree house on a hill at the end of a long driveway around 9 a.m. when the buck appeared out of a kudzu patch at The Cardinal’s entrance.

“He was chasing a doe,” Burris said. “I was drinking coffee.”

Burris threw down his mug and grabbed his binoculars when he saw the monster whitetail at 100 yards, then immediately picked up a .50-caliber Remington muzzleloader he’d borrowed from his father.

Burris only has windows only at the front and back of the tree house, and the buck and doe were on a blind side, so he got up, but by then, the buck had trotted around to the back side.

“He was still movin’, and I was whistling at him to try and make him stop,” he said. “I whistled six times before he stopped. I could only see the back of his shoulder to the front of his hips (forelegs). He was between two big oak trees.”

Burris squeezed the trigger with the buck standing 65 yards away, and the deer bolted. It ran through some woods toward a small pond, across a driveway and through two properties.

“We tracked him all day, about eight hours,” he said. “I’d hit him a little back and high. We asked the homeowners if we could look, and they said okay,” Burris said. “At about 4 p.m., I saw a neighbor on a lawnmower and asked him if he’d seen a buck and doe. He said he hadn’t seen the doe, but there was a big buck lying dead at the corner of a field he’d just mowed. I followed him over there; it was my buck.”

Summerfield taxidermist John Cranford, who is preparing a mount of the deer, scored it at 172 6/8 gross non-typical inches and 167 5/8 net inches.

The 18-point rack with a 23½-inch inside spread has several abnormal points, one that wraps around the back of the buck’s head and is between three and four inches long, a 2½- to 3-inch abnormal on the left beam and a 4-inch drop tine.

“The good Lord really took care of me that morning,” Burris said.

Pittman bottles a Warren giant

Few big-game animals are smarter than a whitetail buck that’s lived past 3½ years. A deer Daniel Pittman of Louisburg killed Nov. 2, 2011, in Warren County proved the point.

Pittman, 30, who moved from Henderson to Louisburg 2½ years ago, still works the swing shift at St. Gorvain Glass Company (a bottling plant) in Henderson. He has had access to some private land he and a friend had been sharing with a local deer dog club for 10 years.

“It’s just a little piece of land me and my buddy have hunted dove and goose at for the last 16 years,” he said. “I started deer hunting there about nine years ago. (The dog hunters) had been trying to kill this deer all season.”

The day he dropped the huge buck, Pittman and his friend had jumped the deer as they were going to a permanent stand.

“The same day we went down there, I told my dad I needed to cut a few limbs so I could shoot into an oak grove,” he said. “Me and my friend saw a bunch of trees rubbed up good that morning. Going in, we jumped a big deer — we couldn’t see his antlers — out there into the cutover. But he came back that evening.”

Pittman’s homemade ladder stand was in a nearly perfect spot, at a bottleneck. It had a swamp and cutover to the right, an oak grove behind and a soybean field to the left.

“I think it had been layin’ in a piece of cutover from 75 to 300 yards wide and on either side of a pond,” he said. “That’s how he stayed away from the dog hunters.”

After arriving about 4 p.m., Pittman climbed into his stand. With about 10 minutes of legal shooting time left, he began to make grunt calls.

“I had grunted an a little 6-pointer came out (of the cutover),” said Pittman, who had a rag soaked in deer lure that brought the buck right to his tree — it began rubbing its antlers on the trunk.

“I think the big one heard the 6-pointer, and he came out of the cutover,” he said.

The buck ran toward the smaller deer, stopping about 22 yards from Pittman, who aimed his .300 Winchester Magnum Tactical 110 rifle and shot it in the chest as it was facing him.

The massively-tined buck, which weighed 176 pounds and sported a 6×6 main-frame rack with a 1½-inch abnormal point off the base of one brow tine, fell in its tracks.

The buck’s beautiful, mahogany-coloredv rack has a 20½-inch outside spread. Its longest tine is 13¼ inches long, and the main beams measure 22½ and 24¾ inches. “It had cedar bark in its antlers,” Pittman said.

The rack, scored at Hayes Taxidermy in Epsom, totaled 167¾ net typical inches, making it one of the highest-scoring typical racks taken in North Carolina during the 2011 season.

Rockingham may have a B&C book buck

Hunters who don’t allow small bucks to walk should take note of what Ronnie Collins has been doing and how it paid big dividends.

A Raleigh native living at Belews Creek in the northeastern corner of Forsyth County, Collins passed up several chances to take a 17-inch, 10-point buck during 2010. Hunting the same area Nov. 17, 2011, in nearby Rockingham County, Collins dropped the full-grown monster with one shot from his Weatherby 300 Magnum.

The buck, still a 10-pointer but whose rack added jaw-dropping mass and developed split brow tines, has been scored at 172½ inches by his father, R.W. “Wayne” Collins, a Boone-and-Crockett scorer who measures racks at the Dixie Deer Classic.

“My dad and I hunt trophy deer. I usually kill a doe each three years for meat and that’s it — unless I see a really big one.”said Ronnie Collins, who was hunting on his father’s farm that fateful day. “It has a little power-line cut-through on the property. I was near the cut-through in a 16-foot ladder stand.”

After climbing into his stand at 3 p.m., he began a long wait.

“I think a hot doe must have come through before I got there, because when he came out he was trailing,” Collins said. “He was the only deer I saw that day.”

“When I saw him I knew he was massive and a shooter, but I had no idea what was actually on his head.”

The buck was nearly across the power line when it stopped, and Collins fired.

“He ran about 60 yards, but I was a little nervous because most deer I shoot with the Weatherby go down — but he ran off,” Collins said.

Then, when he climbed down and walked to where he knew the monster buck had been standing, Collins saw no signs of a hit “and I freaked out.”

“When I first saw him, I knew he was massive, but I didn’t have much time to make a decision (about where to aim),” he said. “It could have been seven seconds or 38 seconds. I just don’t know, except it was quick.”

Gathering his wits, Collins started walking in the direction the deer had bolted and found it lying a few yards away.

“I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” he said. “I’d always hoped to take a 150-class buck.”

He was looking at considerably more inches than 150. The most striking aspect of the rack is its width — 22¾ inches outside and 19½ inside, with main beams of 27½ and 26 5/8 inches. The buck has three tines at 10 inches or better and one just short of 10, plus two more longer than seven.

“The beams are so heavy and symmetrical,” he said. “It has one 2¾ (inch) kicker and another that’s not 1-inch long.”

If the score holds up when officially measured, Collins’ deer will tie as the seventh-largest typical buck ever taken in North Carolina and the state’s 17th typical entry in the Boone & Crockett Club’s record book.

Youngster downs Caswell trophy

Every winter it seems a young hunter puts a trophy whitetail on the ground, and 2011 was no exception.

Austin Shelton of Pleasant Garden, a freshman at Southeast Guilford High School, joined a list of successful hunters last season. The only incongruent aspect that made his feat less than a perfect alignment was the fact he wasn’t 11 years old.

“I killed the deer on 11/11/11, it had 11 points, and it was just a few minutes past 11 o’clock,” said Shelton, 14. “And it was close to my 11th deer — but I can’t verify that. The 11 stuff was cool.”

Shelton was hunting with his grandfather, George Suddreth and Uncle “Georgie” Suddreth Jr. His father, Greg Shelton, a UPS driver, had to work but drove his son to his grandpa’s home in Caswell County after finishing his shift.

“We all got in stands early that morning,”Austin Shelton said, “but we hadn’t seen anything, so we decided to do a man drive. I set up where I could see part of a lake.”

He’d been told to go to a creekbottom but decided he had a better field of vision from a roadbed atop of a nearby hill. Pretty soon, a cowhorn buck chased a doe up the hill toward his grandfather. The doe swam across an arm of Hyco Lake, and the cowhorn ran past his uncle.

“Just a few seconds after the cowhorn ran by me I heard noise in the leaves, and the buck stepped out 20 yards from me in the roadbed,” he said.

Austin Shelton raised his .50-caliber New Frontier Bear Tooth Magnum in-line muzzleloader, took aim and fired.

“His back legs buckled, then he started limping toward me, and he was lookin’ right at me, so I got behind a big tree, then he went back where he came from,” he said. “I felt sick because I walked over there and couldn’t find a blood trail, but I’d heard him when he fell against a sapling tree. I heard him tryin’ to get up.”

Austin Shelton’s uncle walked into the woods and found the deer, which had a broken right knee joint. The boy’s .50-caliber bullet had hit the buck in the shoulder.

A taxidermist scored the buck, with a 5×5 mainframe rack, a 20-inch inside spread and one abnormal point at the end of the left beam, at 157 gross typical inches.

Wrestling buddies tag team non-typical

It’s usually a good idea to get in the woods early, but a young 19-year-old freshman home from college could be forgiven for sleeping late after staying out the previous night.

Such was the case Nov. 27, 2011, for Brown Summit’s Ridge White, home for fall break from Pembroke State University, where he’s a wrestler.

“I was gonna get up, but I didn’t until 8:30 that morning,” he said.

Not to worry; things still worked out fine for him.

After driving to a farm in Guilford County with former high school teammate, Blake Milliway, White plopped down against a tree on a ridge line facing a swamp below them. He’d seen a “bunch of tracks and several scrapes” near the swamp.

“It was about 10 a.m.,” said White, who had only hunted the property twice. “Blake was sitting next to me.”

They’d agreed that Milliway, who’d never taken a whitetail, would shoot any buck smaller than a 9-pointer White had killed Thanksgiving Day in Rockingham County. It didn’t work out that way.

“It was cold and sunny,” White said. “So we’re sitting there, talking quietly, when this buck walked out of the swamp 75 yards from us.”

White looked through the Leupold scope on his Browning .300 Winchester Magnum, told his friend “I’ll take this one,” put the crosshairs on the deer’s right shoulder and pulled the trigger — and the deer bolted back into the swamp.

“I thought I’d missed him,” White said, “and that was a surprise because my WinMag usually skins ’em.”.

They waited an hour, walked to the swamp, which was dry, and didn’t find any signs of a hit.

“Then I walked in the direction (the buck) had run and found a big splotch of blood on the ground,” White said.

Trailing blood droplets, they spied the 4×4 main-frame buck 40 yards away. Its antlers carried 11 total points, heavy mass and an 8-inch drop tine off its right beam, including two “kicker” points attached to the drop tine. Not only that, but the buck was huge.

“We gave up tryin’ to drag him out of the woods,” White said. “We could only pull him 20 yards, then we’d have to stop and rest. I’d estimate he weighed 220 pounds.”

White left Milliway with the deer, returning with a 4-wheeler. They loaded the deer and drove it out of the swamp.

A taxidermist scored the rack at 149 net non-typical inches.

Lincoln County produces big buck

The only Lincoln County entry among the thousands of whitetails listed in the Dixie Deer Classic’s Honor Roll of big bucks came in 2006, a 128½-inch buck killed by bowhunter Christopher Byers.

It’s no wonder the 140 1/8-inch, 195-pound 10-pointer Chad Beard killed last Nov. 7, caused a stir.

“My buck probably is the best ever taken in Lincoln County,” said Beard, 37, who owns a commercial cleaning company. “You just don’t see deer like this up here.”

Beard has about 300 acres to hunt, including family land and surrounding leases.

“Three years ago, me, my brothers and other family members implemented an 8-point minimum rule for bucks and started killing does,” he said. “We’ve seen some big deer since then, and I got some trail-camera photos of this deer last August.”

That morning, Beard said he let a pretty 8-pointer and a spike buck walk.

“I got in the stand 20 minutes before daylight,” he said. “I was in a Buckshot climber and 30 feet up a poplar tree. I like to get high to get out of the wind. I’m a firm believer in Scent-Lok and climbing high.”

At 7 a.m., Beard saw the buck step out of a thicket 50 yards away.

“I’d been using a can (doe bleat) call,” he said. “He got within 40 yards of me and was standing in a scrape.”

Beard used a .50-caliber Thompson Center Encore muzzleloader and a 240-grain Hornady sabot bullet to drill the buck behind its right shoulder.

“I saw him run maybe 20 yards, then he fell,” Beard said.

The buck, which weighed 195 pounds, had 11 scoreable points on a 5×5 mainframe rack with one 2-inch abnormal point. The main beams are 21 inches long with 7-inch brow tines and a 17-inch inside spread.

“I know a 140 1/8-inch deer is pretty average for the rest of the state, but it’s a monster in Lincoln County,” Beard said. “Deer don’t live to be too large here. It’s like killing a 180-inch Iowa deer.”

Change of venue worked in Surry

Sometimes it’s the mark of a wise hunter to make adjustments. That’s what Jeff Hamilton of Pilot Mountain did, and it paid off with his best white-tailed buck.

“I had only five trail-camera pictures of this deer in two years, and he always was in the background, shying away from my feeders,” he said. “He was like a ghost for two years.”

Hamilton, 49, said he decided to move his stand about 50 yards from his feeder during muzzleloader season in Surry County.

“It paid off Nov. 17,” he said. “An 8-pointer came to the feeder, then I looked up at 5:30 and suddenly, he was gone. I looked the way he’d been looking and saw the 10-pointer sneaking by.”

Waiting for the buck to clear some small bushes, Hamilton raised his Thompson Center Pro Hunter. He looked through the Nikon Pro Hunter 4×9 variable scope he had dialed back to 5-power because it was getting dark.

“He wasn’t moving very quickly, just moseying along, then he stepped out from behind the brush about 40 yards, and I let the fire fly,” he said.

The big buck ran about 50 yards and crashed down.

“But (at first), when the smoke cleared, I looked and he was just standing there, then he took off with his tail up,” Hamilton said. “I thought ‘Oh, no, I missed the biggest deer I ever seen in my life.’ “

The upset hunter had forgotten his flashlight and by then, darkness had covered the landscape. He went home, got a light, returned and found some blood where the buck had been standing. After a short search, he found the deer piled up.

The 10-pointer, which weighed 190 pounds and was shot through both lungs, had a 21¾-inch spread; its rack totaled 154¾ Boone-and-Crockett inches, according to taxidermist Billy Owens.

Third buck is charm for Ruffin hunter

Rockingham County’s secret as a big-buck enclave has escaped.

Just north of Guilford County and bordering Virginia, Rockingham’s habitat at least matches and perhaps surpasses most of the “Trophy Belt” counties along the state’s northern tier.

Split by two major river drainages (Dan and Haw) and marked by hardwood slopes and many agricultural fields, Rockingham is a trophy hunter’s dream.

Joe Priestley of Ruffin added another page to the whitetail legends already being passed on about this place.

On Nov. 19, he used a 50-caliber CVA muzzleloader to down a monster buck with a main-frame 5×5 rack and two small abnormal points on the back of each main-beam base. The gross tally is 165 Boone-and-Crockett inches.

“I let my buddy, Kacey Suits, use my rifle and go to a food plot while I had the muzzleloader — even though it was rifle season — and I went to a thicket,” Priestley said.

Priestley said his trail cams that had caught images of the buck last year, and he saw the animal in the same thicket two years ago but let it walk.

“I was using a grunt call about 5 p.m.,” he said. “Two button bucks had come though, but only 10 or 15 minutes of shooting light were left when this deer ran off the two button bucks.”

In a lock-on stand 20 feet off the ground, Priestley had a good view of an opening in the swamp where several deer trails converged and where he’d placed some cob corn

His shot struck the buck behind the left shoulder, and the bullet passed through both lungs and lodged against the skin on the opposite side.

“He ran about 30 yards and crashed,” Priestley said. “I could see where he fell but couldn’t actually see him. I about had a heart attack when I walked up.”

The deer’s rack, being prepared by Eric Knowles of Broken Arrow Taxidermy, is extremely wide and high and has heavy mass around the main beams. It sported five tines on each side and one small abnormal point on the back of each brow tine. The inside spread measured 19 1/8 inches with main beams of 25 and 26 inches with one 10-inch tine and three more measuring 9 7/8 inches each.

Harnett hunter bulldozes his way to 17-pointer

.Harnett County is making inroads as a trophy-deer haven in the south-central Piedmont.

Each season, hunters bag at least one or two bucks of braggin’ size in this area between Raleigh and Fayetteville.

Adam Swann of Broadway added to the county’s reputation last Nov. 21, with a single shot with his Browning 7mm Magnum from a ground blind, dropping a non-typical monster with 17 scoreable points.

“I got off work, flew home and got in the stand before 5 p.m.,” Swann said. “I can sneak into the stand pretty easy.”

Swann had cleared a lane in a 2-year-old cutover and placed a homemade ground blind about 50 yards from a spot where he fed shelled corn regularly.

“I’d put out a 5-gallon bucket twice a week until (deer) started eatin’ it good, then I put out a 50-pound bag a week,” he said.

The rut was in high gear in mid-November, and Swann said he’d been seeing lots of deer tracks at his corn pile.

“The Sunday before, I saw his track, and knew I needed to be in the woods,” he said.

Fifteen minutes after Swann took a seat in his plywood blind with windows and a shingled roof, the big buck walked into the open lane.

“I’d never seen him before,” Swann said. “He was facing me about 50 yards out, and I shot him in the chest. He dropped right there.”

The buck’s rack, a 5×5 mainframe, sports 17 scoreable points, including two abnormal points on the right main beam and seven on the left beam.

“The horns are palmated, too,” Swann said, “and he weighed 160 or 170 pounds. The G2s and G3s are all about 10 inches long.”

Swann said once tobacco fell into disfavor, he believes farmers began planting more amenable crops for deer (soybeans, corn), plus Harnett has a lot of second-generation growth cutovers, perfect places for deer to hide.

Yadkinville taxidermist bests his clients

It’s not often a taxidermist gets to prepare a shoulder mount of a deer he bagged that’s bigger than any his customers killed, but that happened to Chris Bowen of Sugartown Taxidermy in Yadkinville.

Bowen, who works as a resource officer for Statesville Middle School, had trail-camera photos of a deer from 2010 “that showed he was pretty much a typical (rack).”

“He was completely nocturnal,” Bowen said. “I left my trail cams out in January and got pictures through the end of the month. but still no daytime shots.”

Bowen, 36, said he was encouraged because the January photos meant the buck had survived and might be around in 2011.

On Nov. 19, opening day of rifle season in the Northwest Zone, Bowen had no reason to expect to see the huge buck he craved to put in his crosshairs.

“I didn’t really have the cameras out, and I also hadn’t hunted much because I was busy at work,” he said. “I hunt a real small piece of property, too, only 75 acres, and there’s a lot of hunting pressure on the adjoining land.”

Nevertheless, he kept his hopes up because he had planted several food plots that were drawing does.

“I actually saw (the buck) twice the day I killed him, the first time running a doe 300 yards away in the bottom I hunt,” said Bowen, who passed up the shot because he only got a fleeting glance of the multi-tined monster.

He returned that evening.

“I was in the same rifle stand, a stand where I’ve killed a lot of deer,” Bowen said.

A creek runs through the field that forms an “L” shape, with his favorite box stand at one end.

“There’s a hill on one side, and (the deer) came out 100 to 120 yards up the hill on a terrace,” Bowen said. “It’s always been a good hot trail.”

The buck stepped out into the open, well within rifle range, but Bowen wasn’t exactly sure it was his buck. By the time he raised his binocs, the deer broke and ran across the field toward a couple of does on the other side. That settled it.

“I grunted twice, but it didn’t faze him, then I almost yelled a grunt, and he slammed on brakes and bristled,” Bowen said. “I saw his width and height and knew it was better than anything I had on my wall.”

He found the deer’s shoulder in his crosshairs and squeezed the trigger. The buck began a 70-yard “loop” in the field, Bowen said, then headed into the thicket from which it had emerged.

“I listened to it thrashing around, then it got quiet, so I called my dad and told him to bring the truck down to the field because I had shot a big buck,” he said.

By the time the elder Bowen arrived, it was 6 p.m. When Bowen got within 10 or so feet of the thicket, he shined his light and saw the deer’s white rump and tines.

“Daddy went nuts then and literally jumped on the deer, grabbing its antlers and saying things like ‘Here’s another one (point),’ grabbing its legs, trying to pull it out of there and he was just getting ripped to shreds by the briars, but he acted like he didn’t feel anything,” Bowen said.

When they finally extricated the buck from the tangle, they saw its right-front knee joint had been broken in the past, probably by a car collision.

The 5×4 mainframe rack has nine abnormal points with an outside spread of 22 1/8 inches and an inside spread of 16½. The beams measure 24 5/8 and 24 inches, and the buck has one tine longer than 11 inches, another longer than 10 and two more longer than nine.

“I kept hoping I’d benefit by passing up (smaller) deer the last couple of years, and the patience paid off this year,” Bowen said.

Person County gives up another trophy whitetail

Mike Davis, a Burlington lake warden (Lake MacIntosh), said 2011 was his third season to try his luck in Person County.

He hadn’t killed a trophy deer and wasn’t expecting to see one on Nov. 12. He was hunting with two locals — his brother, Chris, and friend Jeff Roberts — and Jay Brewer and Rusty Cheak of Greenville, Texas.

Davis and friends were hunting a Person County farm where his family once raised and cropped tobacco. He was in a ladder stand in some open oaks near a beaver swamp that morning.

“I’d seen a doe come across my shootin’ lane about 90 minutes after I got there at 6:49 a.m.,” he said.

After the doe, the buck walked into the lane about a half-minute behind and 75 yards from Davis, who aimed his Browning 7mm Magnum bolt-action rifle with a Bausch & Lomb scope at the top at the buck’s shoulder and pulled the trigger.

“I think I hit him a little back, then I wasn’t sure, because most of the time a buck will run off fast, but he just trotted away about 40 yards and looked back,” he said.

But a few moments the deer “started walking wobbly” and crashed down after a few more steps.

The buck, which weighed 160 pounds and had a nearly perfect 10-point rack. Taxidermist Randy Dunkley of Hurdle Mills scored the rack at 152 gross inches.

Wake hunter downs wide giant

Sammy Alford was glad his bosses at Puryear Transport turned the staff loose after a half-day of work last Nov. 30. That allowed him time to get to his favorite deer-hunting place just outside the Roseville city limits, climb into a tripod stand and hammer the widest-rack buck he’s ever seen.

Alford said this buck — which a 25-inch outside and 23 5/8-inch inside spread — had been seen on the opposite side of a swamp from where Alford normally hunts.

“I hunted over there from a tripod stand three times and didn’t even see a doe,” he said. “My wife laughed at me, so I went on the computer to Google Earth and looked up the swamp. It’s only 14 acres and all thicket, with agricultural fields on both sides.”

Alford said Google Earth showed what looked like a deer trail bisecting the swamp from the opposite side where he’d placed his tripod.

“My wife had a bow stand over there,” he said. “I found a nice rub tree, made a ground blind around a pine tree, put out some deer scent, then sat down against the pine.”

He sat for an hour, intermittently using a doe-bleat can call.

“At 4:10, I made a grunt tending call and heard something coming through a thicket behind me; it made two real grunts,” Alford said. “I turned my head to look behind me and saw the buck; he was twisting his head so he could get through the thicket.

“He popped out 10 yards from me, and I let him have it with my daddy’s 30-year-old Remington 1100 12-gauge (00 buckshot).”

The buck fell, put its head down, then rose and started to walk away, so Alford shot it in the side a second time.

“I only had two shells in the gun, and I was ready to go over there and jump on him if he got up, but he didn’t,” he said.

The deer’s rack has 14 scoreable points, according to wildlife biologist Jeff Bates, who scored the head at 145 net inches. The rack is a 5×4 with three abnormal points. The main beams are 22 and 23 inches in length, but the tines are short, ranging from 5½- to 6 inches long.

Spencer Lofton of Lofton’s Taxidermy in Louisburg is preparing the mount of this Wake County giant.

Reidsville’s Brady bags huge 8-pointer

Sandy Brady of Reidsville has had a long and varied career in the outdoors media world, but he still gets a charge out of hunting and bagging big whitetail bucks.

During the past two years, he has dropped two high-scoring trophies in Rockingham County.

On the last day of 2011 Central Zone muzzleloader season, Brady was in a stand along a riverbottom with a .50-caliber CVA Wolf loaded with a 240-grain sabot round.

“We manage for big bucks at this property,” said Brady, whose stand was positioned along a powerline whose underbrush hadn’t been trimmed in a while.

“I got to my stand at daylight,” he said.

Brady said he eventually would place 80 bags of “Buck Yum” — a deer food mix of oats, peanuts, cashews, molasses and peanut dust that’s the brainchild of former Carolina Panthers fullback Brad Hoover — near this stand.

“I’d just put the third bag of Buck Yum on the bait pile because the deer had devoured the first two,” said Brady, who saw some does easing though the woods to the bait pile, then a massive 8-pointer appeared and began to chase the does.

Brady shouldered his smokepole, aimed, pulled the trigger and hit the deer behind its front shoulder at 85 yards.

“I was a little high and saw him run and cut into the woods off the power line,” Brady said.

A short search turned up the big 8-pointer 30 yards into the woods.

“He was pushing 200 pounds,” Brady said.

The buck’s rack, scored by Reidsville taxidermist Keith Neal, totaled 161 inches.