Rockingham Racks Rock

A Tobacco farmer who rediscovered a love of bowhunting bagged 2006’s No. 1 N.C. typical buck.

Rockingham County lies squarely in the middle of the northern tier of counties known as North Carolina’s trophy buck region.

This portion of the state likely holds so many big deer because it’s sliced into three parts by major drainages formed by the Mayo, Dan and Haw rivers. That physical attribute, plus its border with southern Virginia means it has major whitetail travel corridors.

Last year Rockingham County produced three award-winners at the 2007 Dixie Deer Classic in Raleigh, the most divisional champions from one Tar Heel county in a single year (Rockingham and other counties have supplied two divisional winners in past years).

The second-highest-scoring (but N.C.’s top archery kill) of of 2006 belonged to Byron Ellington, a 33-year-old tobacco farmer from Reidsville who tends about 1,000 acres, including 115 acres of the golden leaf.

His job means he must travel between farms and across the southern tier of the county during the summer. Because of his work schedule, Ellington sees a lot of wildlife at several farm leases that have good whitetail populations.

“When I came back home from college (UNC Greensboro with a degree in economics) to help my dad farm, I continued to hunt, just as I did when I was growing up,” he said.

Ellington became interested in bow hunting when he was a freshman at Rockingham Senior High.

“I started having some success, even back then,” he said. “I’ve killed deer since I started in high school, but nothing like this buck.”

Like most bow hunters, Ellington said when he first started the sport he wasn’t discriminating when he chose targets.

“Back then, every deer looked big,” he said with a laugh. “But now that I’ve matured a little more as a hunter. I’ve started letting more deer walk and grow. Normally, I don’t get to do a lot of bow hunting because tobacco (harvesting, curing, grading, packing and taking leaf to market) runs to the end of October.”

Still, a friend of his, a N.C. Highway Patrol trooper named Dwayne Smith, and Ellington have been hunting more with archery equipment the last two or three years.

“Dwayne boosted me (about archery hunting), got the fever back into me, so now I squeeze every spare minute in the woods I can,” he said.

One of his rare free moments occurred Oct. 14, 2006, and Ellington took advantage to put the biggest buck of his hunting career on the ground.

“I’ve got three daughters, and the middle child had a birthday party scheduled for the 15th in Greensboro,” he said. “So I had to get in some hunting Friday because I knew I wouldn’t have time to be in the woods Saturday.”

It was the second time in 2006 that Ellington had hunted this particular Rockingham farm, and he hadn’t been impressed by what he’d seen during his first visit.

“I saw a few small bucks on the way out (from his stand to his truck),” he said.

He’d seen a few rubs but had no idea what type of buck created them.

“We’ve got some food plots planted, but really, I hadn’t hunted the farm in about 3 years,” Ellington said. “We were kind of letting it rest. But there wasn’t supposed to be anyone else hunting there.”

In fact, he hadn’t even placed a stand at the property. However, a few days earlier, a ground-hog hunting friend who attends the same church was at the farm and saw something interesting. He told Ellington’s father he’d spotted a buck “that looked like an eight-pointer, maybe 20 inches wide.”

With a short evening to hunt, Ellington decided to give the farm a try. He took a Summit climbing stand and hauled himself into the air about 5:30 p.m. He placed the stand at the edge of a soybean field with a horseshoe-shaped “finger.”

“It was about 50-yards wide and 150-yards long,” he said. “The whole field covered about 6 acres.”

In addition to the beans, other factors made this neck of the field an ideal spot for a tree stand.

“This little finger (of the field) has a cutover on one side, a pine thicket at the very back, and on the opposite side was hardwoods,” Ellington said. “As I went down the left side of the field, a few white oaks were dropping acorns on the edge of the field.”

He placed his stand on a poplar tree 10 yards from the field edge with a clear view of the field.

“(The buck) came out about 6:10 or 6:15 (p.m.),” he said. “I feel like this whole thing may have been Fate because I started not to go that evening. I told my wife it was probably too late — but I went anyway.”

At the time the big deer appeared, a small buck and a few does already were in the field, chowing down on beans.

“He came out of the pine thicket (on the other side of the field),” Ellington said. “He had his head down in the soybeans when I first saw him, so I
didn’t know how big (his rack) was. I knew he was a big-bodied deer; that was real clear.”

Luckily for Ellington, the buck meandered to the middle of the field then started walking down its center, headed straight for the hunter.

“He stopped about 40 yards from me the first time; I had no idea what his head was like because he kept it down most of the time, and the soybeans were waist high,” Ellington said.

When the buck started to eat beans once more and work its way closer, Ellington, wearing a Scent Block hunting suit and camouflage gloves and face mask, got ready to take a shot he estimated at about 26 yards (later, when he measured the distance, it was 28 yards).

“I put my first sight-pin on him,” he said. “But I had a problem because I was standing up and some overhanging limbs that were good for a canopy to hide me caused a (sight) problem when I stood up.”

The hunter was holding a Mathews Outback compound bow set at 60-pounds draw weight. The bow was fitted with an HHA sight, a round globe with one adjustable sight pin. David Hendrix, a bow expert now employed at Gander Mountain in Greensboro, had set up the bow.

Ellington had eased to a standing position, he said, the first time the buck stopped in the field.

“I had to squat to get off the shot,” he said. “It was pure luck. By that I don’t mean the shot was lucky, but none of the (other) deer had smelled me because the wind was coming from them to me, and they
hadn’t seen me because of the overhanging limbs. The set-up was ideal; everything that needed to happen for me happened just right.”

When Ellington released his Gold Tip arrow with a 100-grain Muzzy three-bladed broadhead, the sight pin was on the buck’s shoulder.

“When I shot, he was broadside to me, but as soon as I shot I felt like I’d shot a little toward his rear,” Ellington said.

The arrow flashed through the air, disappeared when it reached the buck’s lower body, then the animal bolted across the field.

“He ran into the hardwoods,” Ellington said. “I listened but never heard him fall.”

Shaken by the experience, he sat in his stand until darkness enveloped the landscape.

“I got down from the tree and walked toward where I thought the arrow would be,” he said. “I found it stuck in ground, but there was no sign of blood anywhere. I thought the shot must have been even farther back than I thought — or I missed him.”

He reached into his quiver and pulled out a field tip arrow he uses for shooting at ground hogs and foxes and stuck it in the ground where he’d found his hunting arrow. Then he walked to his truck and drove home. He didn’t want to spook the deer if it was wounded and create a long tracking problem.

“When I got home, I told my wife I’d shot a pretty nice deer, but I didn’t make a good shot,” he said.

Ellington got up the next next morning at 7:30 a.m. and, after breakfast, loaded a four-wheeler into his truck, then got the family’s pet, a Labrador dog, to climb into the front passenger seat.

“I drove to the field with our Lab, then I got off and walked over to the arrow I used to mark where the buck’d been standing,” he said. “The funny thing is the Lab’s never trailed a game animal for me, but I felt like I needed to take him that morning.”

After retrieving his arrow, Ellington and his dog followed the buck’s trail through the soybeans to the field’s edge.

“I didn’t find a single drop of blood,” Ellington said. “There was absolutely no signs I’d hit that deer.”

Ellington and his Lab walked into the woods about 75 yards, hoping to see some kind of sign. Ellington also hoped the dog might pick up a scent.

“I noticed the dog acting like he was on the track of something,” Ellington said. “I figured it was just a (deer) trail where they’d been walking, coming to the bean field. I thought he was smelling that or where another deer had walked.”

But the Labrador kept going deeper into the woods, its nose to the ground.

“That’s when it occurred to me if I did make a good shot, maybe he was picking up that odor,” Ellington said.

After walking another 75 yards or so, Ellington said he looked about 30 or 40 yards in front of the dog and saw the buck lying on the ground.

“It looked like he’d just bedded down,” he said. “He was flat on his belly with his chin turned back, resting on his left front shoulder like he was asleep.”

As Ellington and his dog slowly moved toward the deer, it didn’t jump up and run away. That’s when the hunter knew the buck was down for good.

“I’m so glad I didn’t go after him the night before,” he said. “There’s no telling where he’d gone if I started tracking him then.”

Ellington noted he’d hit the buck 3 1/2 to 4 inches farther toward its back and about 1 to 1 1/2 inches above the bottom of its stomach — a target he didn’t intend to hit.

“I don’t know if that was caused by me being nervous or having to squat down to shoot,” he said.

“The arrow had some clear liquid on it but no blood, so it must have passed through the buck’s stomach,” he said.

He dragged the deer to the field, then loaded it onto his four-wheeler, then took it to Hendrix, who green-scored the buck’s rack at 159 4/8 inches. When the antlers were re-scored at the 2007 Dixie Deer Classic, the net score was 152 5/8 inches, making it the second-highest N.C. typical rack taken in 2006 (the No. 1 2006 typical rack belonged to Duane Boston of Claremont, whose muzzle-loader buck totaled 153 2/8 inches).

Ellington’s buck, scored as an eight-pointer, had a 20-inch inside spread with a right main beam measuring 24 1/8 inches. The right-side G1 was 6 4/8 inches, the G2 was 9 5/8, and the G 3 was 10 1/8 inches. The circumference (H) measurements totaled 5 7/8, 4 6/8, 4 7/8 and 3 2/8 inches, respectively.

The left main beam measured 26 1/8 inches, with the tines at 6 4/8, 11 and 9 inches. The H measurements were 5 7/8, 4/48, 4 3/8 and 3 inches.

“I killed a six-pointer a long time ago,” Ellington said, “but nothing else that I’d consider mountable. I hadn’t shot any deer the last year or two with my bow.”

Being selective, he said, probably led to his chance at this buck.

“Nobody had seen him,” he said. “But in years past at that farm, I’d seen a lot of smaller bucks I just let walk. I think that may be the reason he was there — I’d seen him in the past but let him walk away.

“That farm has a lot of potential, and I was just there at the right time, had practiced shooting enough with Dwayne that I was confident in taking the shot.”

Ellington’s buck, prepared by taxidermist Sammy Phillips of Ruffin’s “Hole-In-The-Wall” archery shop, rates No. 15 all-time on the Wake County Wildlife Club’s Dixie Deer Classic typical-rack list.