Farmer kills Boone & Crockett monster on second try.
Brian Andrus got a second chance at the buck of his lifetime Nov. 28, and made it pay off by downing one of the great typical bucks of the 2011-12 hunting season.
The 32-year-old row-crop farmer from Moorhead took advantage of access to a 500-acre block of his family’s Sunflower County farm, part used for duck hunting and the other for deer hunting, to take the deer that has been green scored at nearly 190 inches Boone & Crockett.
“We flood 375 acres for ducks after planting corn,” Andrus said. “But I was on the south end of the place we don’t flood.”
Andrus had trail camera photos of the big buck during 2010 when the whitetail sported a 6×5 rack (six tines on the left side and five on the right main beam), and even had a chance to harvest the deer.
“It was December 2010, and I had my daddy’s gun – a Thompson Center .45-70 that I wasn’t used to,” he said. “I had the deer within 15 yards and pulled back the hammer, and (the buck) heard it click and hauled tail out of there.
“I wasn’t familiar with the gun and had never shot it; I never realized it’d be that loud.”
Andrus was sick he’d missed a chance at the big-racked deer but, more than that, he didn’t know if the monster typical would survive until 2011-12 hunting season.
Ten months passed before he was able to breathe a sigh of relief.
“I got through harvesting corn Oct. 4 and went and bought four new Wild Game Innovations (trail) cameras and put them out Oct. 5,” Andrus said.
The next day, a little past 5 a.m., he got a photo of the buck.
“So the camera had been (in the woods) not even 24 hours, and I had a picture,” Andrus said.
However, the duties of farming prevented him from hunting the deer.
“I had no chance to bow hunt,” he said. “Then it was time to get ready for duck season.”
Once waterfowl season started, Andrus was able to spend more time in the region not flooded for ducks.
“We’d hunt ducks in the morning, then go for deer in the afternoon,” Andrus said.
Andrus said he’d checked his trail cameras the Sunday after Thanksgiving after several hunters had left a deer camp on the property.
“I saw a photo of (the bruiser whitetail) that’d been taken Friday, the day after Thanksgiving,” he said.
That picture made Andrus decide to visit an old tripod stand he hadn’t hunted in more than a year, a stand whose seat had deteriorated.
“I only hunted it two times (in 2010),” he said.
But Andrus had placed one of his trail cams at the intersection of a woods road and deer trail. The trail led from a bedding area to a flooded corn field.
“I figured he was leaving the bedding area to go to that field,” he said.
Andrus got into his stand about 3 p.m. that Monday.
“I had to sit on the frame (of the stand),” he said. “The stand also didn’t have any burlap (cover).”
At 5:17 p.m. the hunter had seen a lone 4-pointer when his luck changed.
“I was looking at the 4-pointer when I caught some movement behind him,” Andrus said. “It was the big boy; he was 60 yards away.”
Andrus said he eased down his hand and grasped his Remington .270 rifle topped with a Leupold scope.
“The buck saw me moving, but I kept slowly picking up the rifle,” he said. ‘I never stopped.”
He clicked off the safety, put the crosshairs on the buck’s neck.
“I had (the scope) set on 3 or 4 (power), and he looked like he was 100 yards out,” Andrus said.
The hunter pulled the trigger, and the buck collapsed in a heap.
The buck’s headgear is massive, with six tines on the left side and seven on the right (exactly opposite 2010’s arrangement). The main beams are 23 6/8 and 25 2/8 inches long, while the left-side tines are 5, 11 2/8, 10 4/8, 3 2/8, 1 6/8 and 1 inches long. The tines along the right beam taped out at 5 3/8, 11 3/8, 10 1/8, 7 4/8, 1 6/8, 2 and 3 2/8 inches. The circumferences on the left at 6 2/8, 5 2/8, 5 2/8 and 4 2/8 inches, while the right side H measurements are 6 6/8, 5 4/8, 5 2/8 and 5 6/8 inches.
Jackson taxidermist Dan Heasley scored the rack at 187 5/8 typical inches, easily a Boone-and-Crockett all-time record-book qualifier.
“The rack has a lot of character,” Andrus said. “There are little stickers all over both beams from the skull to the G1s on both sides. And it’s really thick.”
Not only that, the buck is one of the largest killed in Mississippi in 2011 and weighed 275 pounds.
“It looks like a Canada deer but it’s a Delta buck, and they’re usually big,” Andrus said.
See other bucks killed this season – and add photos of your own – in the Nikon Big Buck Photo Contest, which is open to all registered users of this site.
Everyone who enters the contest will be eligible to win a set of Nikon Monarch ATB 10×42 binoculars, to be given away next month in a random drawing.
Not a member of the Sportsman team yet? It’s free! Just fill out the short registration form to get started today!
Be the first to comment