A Virginia Fall To Remember
By Mark Melotik
Come the rut, it’s likely you’ll find mature bucks hanging in hot pockets of doe activity. Last fall, Virginia’s Richard Butler was dialed in on some of the hottest rut action in the state.
As proof, Richard, 50, would anchor an amazing buck scoring some 188 inches on Nov. 14 during Virginia’s early muzzleloader season. But he was just getting started. His dream season continued just 10 days later during the state’s rifle season when he dropped an even larger buck, a drop-tined giant that would stretch the tape to nearly 200 inches.
For those thinking Richard is the owner of a lucky horseshoe, you might want to think again. Each fall, the lifelong, avid hunter takes several weeks off his job as a maintenance planner at a local factory to focus on hunting — and he gets after it. Does he ever.
As a member of five different hunt clubs, he’s constantly checking for the hottest areas on multiple properties, running six to eight trail cameras and otherwise gathering intel during boots-on-the-ground scouting and hunting missions.
“I had been doing a lot of hunting, primarily looking around for [good areas for] my son, and saw a lot of nice deer,” Richard said. “I saw a lot of good quality deer that normally we would shoot, but I was waiting for something special after muzzleloader season ended.”
In one of the areas Richard had been checking, he ran into four different quality bucks, all good 8-pointers. As rifle season began, he attempted to convince his son, Levi, to hunt the remote area that was nearly a mile off the road, but he begged off in favor of chasing a buck he had sighted on his own during a recent hunt.
Richard had originally pinpointed the area after gathering news from other members of the hunt club who ran dogs for deer, a popular local tactic.
“I figured [the dog hunters] would eventually get back in there, so I wanted to get in there before they riled up everything,” Richard said, explaining that he regularly factors in where other members of his hunt clubs are focusing their efforts. “Up here, you keep up with the people more than the animals.”
On Friday, Nov. 25, Richard made the pre-dawn hike to his chosen spot, planning to still-hunt and sit on the ground, waiting to glimpse rutty bucks passing through. After arriving, still in darkness, Richard was immediately greeted by a welcome sound.
“I heard a lone deer, a buck, walk by before daylight,” he said. “He grunted once and I grunted back to him,” Richard recalled. Fast forward to 9:30 a.m., when Richard believes the same deer came through from the opposite direction on the same trail.
“I’m fairly certain it was the same deer; he’d heard my earlier grunt, and he was maybe circling back, checking the pine thicket for does.”
At first he couldn’t tell the incoming deer was a shooter until it turned its head and he noticed the distinctive left-side drop tine. Richard had never seen a drop-tined buck and knew the trait was unusual for the area.
He leveled his rifle and took the 44-yard uphill shot, then watched as the buck disappeared. At first came confusion, but then he could hear the buck thrashing on the ground. It had dropped quickly, into a small depression.
“I sat there for 30 minutes trying to decipher what just happened,” Richard said. “But I kept hearing him kicking in the leaves. I texted my son, and he told me he killed a bobcat that morning, so it was a really special day. He texted me back, ribbing me, saying that I had shot a small deer.”
When Levi arrived to help drag, he laid eyes a deer that most definitely was not small.
“He had a big smile on his face and just shook his head,” Richard said. “I told him he should have gone to this spot, and this should have been his deer. Bucks were in there chasing does. It was one of those years when the rut just hits perfect. You don’t get them every year — maybe one in every five years it hits like that.”
Richard’s buck was entered into the BTR record book with an official score of 197 2/8 in the Centerfire Rifle Irregular category. The rack features 16 scoreable points, an inside spread of 21 inches, and unique left-side triple main beam. It sports 67 inches of irregular points and, some icing on the cake, a left-side drop tine measuring just over 6 inches.
It was definitely a fall to remember in the Butler family. In addition to Richard’s 197 2/8 giant and his 188-inch buck taken in muzzleloader season, Levi added his rifle-season bobcat, and a 471-pound field-dressed black bear that ranked number one for a youth in the state of Virginia for 2023 — the third-largest in the state last year.