When Logan Wise called a diehard deer-hunting friend to tell him that a big Ohio roadkill would soon grace his wall, the man was understandably skeptical.
“Are you talking MY big or YOUR big?” the man asked Logan, who hadn’t taken up deer hunting, at least not seriously, until he turned 32 five years earlier.
“Your big,” Logan replied. “No doubt.”
Around 11 a.m. on Nov. 29, Logan and his 9-year-old son, Lincoln, were driving home from his inlaws’ traditional Black Friday breakfast at Cracker Barrel when he spotted a dead deer in a roadside ditch. He had decided to take the back way that day.
Knowing full well he was looking at a world-class whitetail, he stopped to examine it and called the Miami County Sheriff’s Department to report the deer and secure a salvage tag. A passer-by stopped to photograph the deer, and he stayed long enough to help Logan load it after the deputy wrote the tag.
Logan, an underground utilities worker for the city of Piqua, also hunts deer, but his recent seasons had been lackluster. In five years of “serious” hunting, he’d yet to shoot a decent buck.
He hunted a lot during the early 2024 season. He shot a 7-pointer in mid-October, but he and a buddy never found more than a couple of drops of blood.
Finding and taking possession of a giant helped soothe that pain.
He thinks a motorist center-punched the buck the night before, since someone came forward later with a trail camera image of it taken Thanksgiving morning. The man who sent the photo had been hunting the deer for five years.
“The guy was pretty shaken up about it,” Logan said.
“The deer was hit near a highway patrol post, so I’m thinking the driver might have been drinking and just wanted to get away from there,” he ventured. “When we skinned the buck, its whole side was green; bruised from head to tail. I still have the cape, in case I want to do more than the Euro mount I now have.
“My wife’s not a fan of shoulder mounts,” he added.
Scott Beam measured the rack at 214 1/8 inches for Buckmasters.
The 14-pointer is a mainframe 5x5 with exceptional beam and tine lengths. Its beams stretch 28 3/8 and 27 5/8 inches, and four of the uprights exceed 11 5/8 inches, the longest 15 2/8. Mass accounts for 41 6/8 inches of its score.
The Miami County roadkill is the second largest Semi-irregular “pickup” ever recorded from Ohio. It’s also tied for the nation’s No. 5 spot in that category.
Logan says the outstanding antlers were even more impressive the previous year, according to trail camera photos.
“There’s no doubt the buck’s rack was on the decline,” he said. “It was way bigger last year.”
