You can do everything possible to create the very best habitat on your land, but the number of mature bucks staying on it will be limited. What I've learned is that it's hard to stockpile mature bucks on any given property without high fences. The dominant buck may well be a huge-bodied, mature 8-pointer while the bucks with the most impressive headgear are smaller in body size and stature. I would also like to inject here that the dominant buck in any specific area may not have the biggest rack in that area. But he usually can find a location where he doesn't have to cower to a dominant animal, at least most of the time. That doesn't mean that this area is necessarily a prime one or that he will be free from more dominant bucks moving through his area. In a wild free-ranging herd, a whitetail buck that is 3 1/2 years old or older can pretty much find an area where he is the boss. No matter how old my " long spike" buck from last season had lived to be, he never would have grown a high-scoring rack. While age is very critical in growing trophy bucks, genetics can be a limiting factor with every animal. Sometimes the biggest buck in a particular location just isn't big enough. I am no longer happy with killing the biggest buck in an area. The longer I hunt whitetails, the more selective I become regarding the bucks I target. One challenge that arose was the need to cull certain bucks from the herd in order to maintain top-end quality on the farm. In fact, my success has been greater than I ever imagined, but some unexpected things have happened along the way as well. Several years ago when I first started working to turn my small farm into a whitetail paradise, I envisioned monster whitetail bucks running all over the property and regularly falling to my arrows. But I had other sound management reasons for wanting to remove this buck from the herd. Besides, I knew this buck would be 4 1/2 years old next season and therefore much harder to kill. So with two buck tags still in my pocket and no venison in my freezer this late in the season, I decided to do some instant management of my own. I had hoped that another hunter would kill him, but that didn't happen. I had watched this buck on our farm for the past two seasons, and he had always carried that spike antler on his right side. But the buck I had just shot was a 3 1/2-year-old that field dressed 218 pounds, and he was far from being what most of us would call a "trophy." While he sported a decent 4-point antler on his left side, his right antler was nothing more than a 17-inch spike. After all, I had passed up a 150-class buck just before shooting this deer. By now you are probably thinking that I had a mature buck down and would soon be visiting the taxidermist. The search was short, and soon I was fixing my tag on the fallen buck. But I had since raised the bar, and now I was looking for an older and hopefully bigger buck.Īt daylight I was back at the scene with friend and cameraman Kevin Boyer to claim my prize. A few years ago I would have been glad to tag such a buck. I had videotaped this buck twice before within easy bow range, and once again the camera rolled as the buck passed by just 20 yards away. The glimpse of antlers increased my pulse until I recognized the buck as a 3 1/2-year-old 150-class 4x4 that I'd seen many times. I had barely settled in for the afternoon hunt when the first whitetail appeared from the bedding cover. It's one of those locations that always hold promise at any time of the season. Nonetheless, I was still confident that I would see some good activity from this stand, even in late season, since it's located near a well-used bedding thicket. But for various reasons, I had let this stand sit vacant through the early season and even during the heat of the rut. I always have a number of stands in place for every conceivable wind direction. Even though it was late December, it was my first hunt from this particular stand.
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