Rack Magazine

Here’s why Jon Black is a staunch believer in trail cameras.

Going into Louisiana’s 2013 deer season, Jon Black and his son, Hunter, had a couple of bucks on their wish lists. They’d combed through thousands of trail camera photographs, and those two towered above the rest.

Hunter wound up taking one of the 1,200-acre farm’s superstars in late November, a 14-pointer that scored in the 170s. By then, however, a third giant had started mugging for their cameras.

The latecomer looked like it might have 14 points, too … on ONE side. And there were just as many on the other antler!

 Black began amassing his river bottom farm, tract by tract, in 2007. The land is in southern Bossier Parish, near the Loggy Bayou Wildlife Management Area.

“We have some really good deer,” said the 60-year-old real estate developer from Bossier City. “We have a lot of does, very little pressure, and we have both resident and transient bucks.

“Also, there’s a strong non-typical gene in our pool,” he added.

Through checking their 16 trail cameras, Jon and Hunter had already identified a couple of great bucks they wanted to harvest in 2013. They had no idea a whitetail wearing more than 200 inches of antler was in the mix until after the season opened.

They’d just returned from a three-week Kodiak hunt. Among the thousands of trail cam photos awaiting their perusal were several nighttime shots of the multiple-beamed deer.

“The buck was coming to a feeder at least every other night, between 3 and 4 a.m.,” Jon said. “We decided it must be spending its days in a nearby thicket we sort of regard as a sanctuary, which meant we had no stands in there.”

The thicket is really overgrown pastureland within former pecan orchards — thigh-high weeds and brush also full of saplings. It’s the perfect hiding place for deer.

The buck with the driftwood rack went AWOL for 10 days, which had Jon and Hunter worried that it might have wandered off and been shot or wounded by another hunter. But when it returned, unscathed, the Blacks retrieved two daytime photos of it — one at dawn, the other at dusk. On one occasion, three different cameras photographed the buck.

From the first to the last, they got about 20 pictures of it.

Having no stands set up within the thicket wasn’t going to stop Jon from prowling the edge. He has no qualms about hunting from the ground, but he wasn’t about to do so until a northeasterly or northerly wind blew through, enabling him to approach the area from the southwest.

“If you blow out every deer in there on the way to your spot, what’s the point?” he asks. “These dudes are smart.”

The stars aligned on Dec. 7, when a strong north wind ushered in below-freezing temperatures. It was 25 degrees when Jon headed out to a grassy road that cut through the buck’s suspected sanctuary.

Hunter was planning to hunt as well, but he wanted to check some trail cameras first, which is why his father decided to sit next to the road, in case Hunter spooked anything en route to the cameras they usually hated to check out of fear of bumping the big buck into another zip code.

About 2 p.m. that day, Jon glanced down the 200-yard stretch and saw a buck running straight away from him at 140 yards.

“If the deer had simply crossed the road, I might not have even seen it,” he said. “I sure wouldn’t have had time to shoot.”

Certain he was looking at the backside of the deer topping his most-wanted list, Jon yelled — as if he couldn’t decide whether to grunt or bleat, and he had to do SOMETHING … loudly, too. So he yelled, “GRUNT-MEAYAH!”

Or something like that.

Surprisingly, the animal stopped and looked over its back at Jon, who was looking at it in his .280 Remington’s scope.

“It was not a good shot (target) at all, but it was clear that’s all I was going to get,” he said. “When the deer turned slightly to resume trotting, I squeezed the trigger.”

From that angle and at that distance, an inch can mean the difference between a lethal and a crippling shot. Jon had no idea where the 140-grain bullet struck, but he knew it hit the animal.

“Had the deer been anything less than that particular buck, because of the low-odds shot, I’d have probably let it pass,” he admitted.

When Hunter arrived to help him take up the trail, they found both hair and a few drops of blood. Rather than plow ahead, which could’ve pushed the deer into a nearby deep bayou, they opted to stop and resume tracking the following day.

“It was HARD to back out,” Jon said.

The next morning, both father and son went to deer stands. They agreed to meet back at the last blood around 10:00 but 30-year-old Hunter, who was hunting about 150 yards from the blood trail, couldn’t wait that long. He was connecting drops shortly after 9:00.

He found where the buck had bedded down three times before he looked ahead and saw it. Its head was up, legs tucked underneath, and it was staring at him. It took a lot of glassing and skirting the unmoving deer before Hunter realized it had died in that position.

He was standing over the animal when he sent the congratulatory text message to Jon, who was still in a deer stand.

“I was fortunate, in more ways than one,” Jon said. “Hunter’s the one who usually gets the really big deer. He’s a fantastic hunter.”

The buck with the gnarly rack was smaller in body than most mature bucks the Blacks shoot at the farm. Hunter’s 14-pointer weighed in at 285 pounds, more representative of the weights there. Jon’s 27-pointer tipped the scales at only 205 pounds.

“I think it was only 3 1/2 years old,” Jon said. “Sure, it had the mass of a much older deer, but its teeth and weight tell a different story.”

In hindsight, Jon believes the operator of a local oil rig saw this deer with four others during the summer.

Hunter: Jon Black
BTR Score 227 7/8
Centerfire Rifle
Irregular

– Photos Courtesy Jon Black

This article was published in the Winter 2014 edition of Rack Magazine. Subscribe today to have Rack Magazine delivered to your home.

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