Blind rattling isn’t particularly effective once the whitetail rut is underway, but tickling the ivories can sometimes tear a lovelorn buck’s gaze away from its heart’s desire. Better yet, the distraction can make it shift into kick-butt mode and charge into bow range.
Chano Bargas knows this, which is why he carried a small set of shed antlers with him when he climbed a tree on Nov. 11, 2020. He was also hoping against hope to see the bull of the woods, and he wanted a full bag of tricks.
The part-time taxidermist from Madill, Oklahoma, saw the first trail camera photos of his target buck in 2016, when it was carrying a respectable 150-plus inches. The following year, he guesses the antlers might’ve measured 170. By 2020, the deer he’d nicknamed Twin Towers had ballooned into a 200-incher.
Chano and his sons, Donny and Johnny, lease 450 acres in neighboring Carter County. During the five years they monitored Twin Towers, they collected only two daytime trail camera photographs of him.
Chano was in a 12-foot-high treestand an hour before daybreak on Nov. 11. Johnny was also hunting that day, about 350 yards away. The rut was just getting started.
Soon after sunrise, Chano heard and then saw a buck chasing a doe 80 yards distant. The light was too poor and the deer too far for him to recognize it, but the wide-racked buck was none other than the nocturnal whitetail he and his sons considered their Most Wanted.
Hoping to lure the animal closer, he began lightly rattling a pair of shed antlers he’d brought along for that very reason. Ironically, the antlers’ former wearer had been one of the big buck’s earlier travel companions.
The doe wanted no part of fight clubbing, but the sound of a buck brawl was too much for her would-be suitor to ignore.
“The buck came on a string, right to me,” Chano told Gita Smith, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “I voice-grunted to stop it at 25 yards, but it kept stepping.”
Chano tried again when the deer was at 20 yards, also to no avail. But when he croaked a third time, which might’ve sounded more like a loud beer belch, the buck skidded to a halt only 16 yards from his tree.
The quartering-forward angle wasn’t optimal, but Chano took the shot before the deer’s brain signaled its feet.
Only when the fatally hit buck spun to flee did Chano recognize the rack.
“When (Johnny and I) walked up and saw which deer it was, we screamed and hollered like a pack of coyotes,” he said.
“From that point onward, I made up for all the time I didn’t look at the antlers while on stand. I couldn’t take my eyes off those things.”
When inside spread isn’t factored, Chano’s 14-pointer ties the state-record Semi-irregular. With the spread added, creating a Buckmasters score of 200 4/8 inches, this deer scores better than the more narrow-racked whitetail that shares the title.
— Read Recent Blog! Forty-minute Roller Coaster: At 188 1/8 inches, John Koleszarik’s public-land 15-pointer is Pennsylvania’s No. 1 Typical by crossbow.