Rare as a Unicorn
By Buckmasters
Headquartered in Montgomery, Ala., Buckmasters has a perceived reputation as being a Southeastern company. Truth is, if you take a map of the United States and overlap it with where whitetails roam and where Buckmasters fans reside, it’s almost a perfect match — we’re just as popular in the Northeast and Mid-West as we are in the Southeast.
Being in Alabama does impact our personal lives, however. For one thing, it means those of us who work here enjoy exceptionally long deer seasons. Bow season starts in mid-October, and firearms seasons don’t end until mid-February (the exact date varies by a few weeks depending on location), but that’s about four full months of deer hunting time!
The drawback, of course, is we don’t see very many giant bucks. A fully mature buck averages in the 130s to 140s score-wise, and most are taken before full maturity. A few years ago I was after a buck we knew was at least 4 years old. He was cautious and didn’t show himself in daylight, and when a club member finally got him, the buck was going downhill and had lost about 15 inches from his rack, which had peaked at about 130 inches the year prior. If you need proof that whitetail rack size is heavily influenced by soil quality, look no farther than the Yellowhammer State.
With that in mind, it’s pretty exciting when we hear of an Alabama buck approaching the legendary 200-inch mark, and that’s what happened when Hunter Smith shot this beautiful buck on Saturday, Nov. 16.
An avid outdoorsman, Hunter makes frequent use of his Wildlife Ecology and Management background in his personal life, and he was just as surprised as everyone else at the size of this buck. He was so shocked, in fact, that he made multiple inquiries to various high-fence hunting operations in the surrounding counties to see if his buck might have been an escapee.
At first all the answers he got indicated his buck was that rare-as-a-unicorn free-range Alabama 200-incher ... until a few days later when he got word his buck may have escaped from a high-fence operation a few years prior.
The operation owner provided Hunter with a few pictures of a much smaller buck that had escaped, but with none of the same antler characteristics.
This case highlights some interesting questions regarding scoring and Buckmasters Trophy Records.
First off, congratulations to Hunter. What whitetail hunter wouldn’t shoot a 200-incher sneaking by his stand? He did everything legally and ethically. What’s more, a buck living in the wild for several years had obviously developed enough survival skills to be considered free-range. It’s an accomplishment and a trophy no matter how you slice it.
He’s also to be commended for putting forth so much effort into determining the buck’s origin. He could have just as easily done nothing and likely claimed Alabama’s #2 spot in the record book.
The BTR rule book is perfectly clear about the classification of escapees. Even a deer that has been in the wild for several years would be classified as high-fence because it is the result of controlled genetics. No matter how wild the deer, it isn’t right to include a buck with human-selected parents (and possibly other ancestors) with bucks whose lineage is completely random.
Interestingly, the BTR is one of the few scoring organizations that will measure high-fence deer, although we keep them separate from free-range bucks.
Which brings us back to Hunter’s buck.
We still don’t know if his buck was the escapee from a few years ago, but we’re communicating with Hunter and will update you on any new developments. It might be possible to determine whether the deer was from the high-fence operation via DNA testing, but several things would have to come together to make that happen, not the least of which is the funds for the testing.
Stay tuned!