Youth Hunter Fells 200” in Michigan
By Patrick Dunning
On the second morning of Michigan’s 2023 youth weekend, 15-year-old Dylan Meyer harvested the state’s third largest whitetail in BTR’s shotgun category on a parcel of land behind his father’s auto repair shop in Ottawa County.
The mainframe 9-pointer tipped BTR scales at 211 6/8 inches with 20 scorable points and a 16-inch inside spread. Dylan’s buck also broke a 34-year-old record, and is the new nontypical record among youth hunters in the state with a score of 211 6/8 inches and 206 1/8 inches (net), according to Commemorative Bucks of Michigan, official record keeper for the Great Lakes State.
“Toward the end of June we got the first photo of him on our property. He was coming almost daily, during daylight, to the edge of this pond behind my dad’s shop. It’s the only source of water in the area and he felt safe there,” Dylan told Buckmasters. “We planted a food plot and he liked it so much he stuck around the entire summer.”
After disappearing for six days the week before youth season, the 20-pointer returned to the pond on Saturday night with dried velvet still draped on its antlers.
The following morning, Dylan and his dad, Dave, situated themselves in a big rig wash bay on the southwest corner of the shop overlooking a field of standing soybeans before sunrise.
“We have beans to the west and corn to the northwest. To the north there’s another one-acre field, and an eight-acre soybean field directly in front of us,” Dylan said. “Me and dad sat in the wash bay on the edge of his building and could see the silhouette of deer already moving in the field that morning.”
Dave noticed the 12x8 just before 7 a.m. grazing through the food plot and attempted to get his camera out and film the shot, but Dylan got antsy and squeezed the trigger of his .450 Bushmaster.
“My dad was moving too slow and it all happened so fast. The buck was halfway up this berm and beginning to walk west. He got to the end of the berm and was going to dip down into a ditch to access the beans,” Dylan recalled. “It was now or never. I ended up shooting him at 100 yards and he piled up 30 yards later in the bean field.”
You can read the full story of Dylan’s buck of a lifetime, in a future issue of Rack Magazine.