You just got to love the whitetail deer rut because you get up and go at “0-dark thirty” every morning when you really thought you were too tired to go and sometimes it pays off. My loving wife encouraged me to go this morning and lo-and-behold a “newbie” shows up on one of our small farms where I was hunting.
I have had a trail cam on this farm since early July and never got a pic of this buck. He was with a doe and trying his best to get her away from me grunting to him. I had to take the shot while he was walking away at 190 yards. He dropped in his tracks though at almost the same spot as I shot a nice 8-point with my bow back in Sept. That funnel has been massaged and tweaked with hard work and some beautiful food plots using Chicory Plus over the last 6-7 years and is a real honey hole now. He is very narrow (14-1/2 inches) as a lot of bucks off this farm appear to be but still grosses 142-6/8. (Picture 1) Trail camera pictures showed the buck in picture 2 was very typical at 2-1/2 years old. He grew a little at 3-1/2, and became a monster for NC at 4-1/2 when I killed him with my bow. He grossed 144-4/8 at 4-1/2 and easily made my first entry into the Pope & Young records. This buck lived his whole life on or near a 68-acre parcel with three well maintained Imperial Whitetail Clover and Chicory Plus plots. No-Plow was also used on this tract of land in the early years until I got the soil pH and the fertility right. If this isn’t proof positive of the power of nutrition and age impact on deer quality, I don’t know what is. 
