Main-frame 10-pointer with sticker point should score in 150s, taxidermist says
An attorney from Eden has killed another huge Rockingham County buck pushing that county to the top of the heap as far as producing trophy bucks in the past several seasons.
Seth Woodall took an 11-point buck the afternoon of Monday, Nov. 4, on property near Eden that carried a rack with better than 150 inches of antlers.
Woodall’s buck, which has an inside spread of 21 5/8 inches, is a main-frame 5×5 with a sticker point between the base and brow tine on its right main beam.
“I’ve been hunting him for two years,” Woodall said. “I hunted him last year to the exclusion of some other good bucks, but I missed him in December with a rifle. I was sick about it, but then he popped up again this year.”
In 2012, the buck was a typical 10-pointer, but he wasn’t nearly as big as he was when Woodall first saw a trail-cam photo of him this year and later killed him at 5 p.m. on Nov. 4.
Woodall shot the buck coming into one of two food plots he’d planted on the property where he was hunting.
“I’ve got a food plot that’s probably an acre-and-a-half that’s in a wildlife mix, and I’ve got another about an acre that’s in winter wheat,” he said. “They’re tearing it up.”
Woodall said the big buck apparently had groceries, not love, on his mind when he showed up on the far end of the food plot.
“He didn’t seem to be rutting that much,” he said. “A lot of younger bucks around here are trying to chase, but I think he was coming for the food.
“He came out about 200 yards away, at the far end of the field, and he worked his way all the way up to me,” Woodall said. “I really thought he was gonna leave. He came out and came toward me, and I thought he was about to turn and go into a pine thicket where I thought he’d been bedding.
“I was about to try him at about 130 yards, but he turned and made his way all the way to me.”
When the buck got to about 50 yards, he presented Woodall with a good shot, and he put a slug from a .50-caliber Savage muzzleloader through his front shoulders.
“He took two steps and dropped,” Woodall said.
Taxidermist Dean Matthews of Pine Hall is mounting Woodall’s buck. He estimated the buck at easily 150 net inches, with main beams measuring 24 ½ and 22 inches, 5-inch brow tines and tines measuring seven, eight and nine inches on each beam.
“The only reason he wouldn’t make 160 is tine length,” Matthews said. “He’s got good, solid mass and he matches up real well.”
Rockingham County is home to the current state-record muzzleloader buck, a 170 5/8-inch typical 10-pointer killed in 1987 by Lindsey Watkins of Madison, then a deputy with the Rockingham County sheriff’s department. It is one of three bucks taken by North Carolina hunters with blackpowder guns that qualified for the Boone and Crockett Club’s all-time record book.
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