Rockingham County buck scored officially as new state-record

Tuttle’s 12-pointer makes B&C record book, is NC’s top archery buck

North Carolina has its second new state-record archery buck in two weeks. A 12-point buck arrowed by Stoneville’s John R. Tuttle on Oct. 1 in Rockingham County was officially scored on Dec. 12 and became the second buck this season to qualify for the Boone and Crockett Club’s all-time record book and break the previous state record.

With a required 60-day drying period complete, Tuttle’s huge deer was scored by Harlan Hall, a retired N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission biologist and Jason Allen, a current Commission biologist, both certified Boone and Crockett Club scorers, at 171 7/8 net typical points. It supplants a Stokes County buck killed Sept. 18 by Tim Watkins at scored 170 1/8 net typical points.

In September, when Hall first saw photos of Tuttle’s buck, he was unsure whether matching points between the brow tines and first long tines would score as typical or abnormal points – a decision that would determine whether the buck was a record-class animal or just a great trophy. But he and Allen quickly decided the matching tines were regular points when they examined the actual rack.

“They come off the top of the main beam in a normal direction and matched on both main beams,” Allen said. “A whitetail’s rack, by Boone and Crockett rules, can have any number of typical points as long as they meet those criteria. And this rack did.”

Allen and Hall even contacted Jack Reneau, the Boone and Crockett Club’s director of big-game records, to ask his opinion and Reneau agreed, according to Allen, that the points in question were typical tines.

The buck’s main beams were 25 5/8 and 26 2/8 inches, respectively. The extremely long brow tines were 9 and 9 4/8 inches, with the two points in question measuring 4 6/8 and 5 3/8 inches. The next two tines on each main beam scored 10 3/8, 11 5/8, 10 1/8 and 9 6/8 inches, and the last tines were 3 3/8 and 2 7/8 inches. Of the eight circumference measurements, seven were greater than four inches. The inside spread was 15 4/8. The buck’s gross score was 179 inches, and it had just 7 1/8 inches of deductions, including a 2 1/8-inch drop tine off the left beam.

Eric Knowles of Reidsville’s Broken Arrow Taxidermy is preparing a shoulder mount of Tuttle’s buck for the Dixie Deer Classic in March 2014.

Before this season, Andrew Kerman’s 166 6/8-inch Guilford County buck, arrowed in 2009, was the state-record typical archery buck.