Every deer season brings with it stories of good times shared with family and friends, sunrises seen from on stand and, of course, deer.
Some readers can attest to that.
Luke Austin of West Deer shot a 10-point buck this year on the firearms season’s first Saturday. He was actually walking, putting on a drive for his brother, when he jumped the deer out of a thicket at about four feet, he said.
With the deer running away from where his brother was posted, Austin shot it.
“This memory will stick with my forever, shooting this buck with my brother meant a lot to me. I couldn’t tell how big he was running through the brush, and when I walked up to him I was quite impressed,” Austin said.
Luke Austin, at right, with his 2015 buck.
Tyler Ruckel, meanwhile, shot his first-ever deer this fall, through the mentored youth program. He’s all of 9 years old and this year was his first in the woods.
According to his dad, Ken, he shot a doe with a .243 in Evans City on the season’s first Saturday.
“She fell where she was shot,” Ken said. “He was very excited.”
Tyler lives in Wexford and attends Bradford Woods Elementary School.
Tyler Ruckel with his first-ever deer. With him is his dad.
David Shuler got a nice deer, too, a little earlier in the year.
Out during archery season, the Harrison City man shot an 8-point in Westmoreland County. He took it with a crossbow on Nov. 11.
David Shuler and his crossbow buck.
Not local, but worthy of a look for their rarity, are the whitetails shot by a couple of hunters in other states.
Brooke Bateman of Dallas shot a buck in November. It was her first deer.
What made it really unique is its color. It’s a black – or melanistic – buck.
A story in the Dallas Morning News says she was hunting with her father Mike. They initially mistook the buck for a black Angus calf.
Brooke Bateman with a black Texas buck.
When they realized it was a deer, they debated for a few minutes whether to shoot it, and eventually decided to go ahead. Brooke killed it at 120 yards.
Why’s that special? Melanistic deer – black because they produce excessive amounts of the dark pigment called melanin — are the rarest of the rare.
Some research suggests about one in 36,000 whitetails are albinos. Black deer are thought to be even rarer, though Texas produces as many of them as anywhere in the world. There, hunters kill about one a year.
Meanwhile, in Missouri, a hunter killed what he thought was a trophy buck, only to find out otherwise. What he’d taken was a 22-point doe.
According to a story in the Springfield News Leader, Curt Russell saw the deer once, but a coyote entered the field containing the deer before he could get off a shot and it disappeared, along with several other whitetails. Russell went back the next day for another try.
The 22-point antlered doe killed in Missouri.
He spotted the deer in the same field with a small buck and several does. He put the big-racked animal down with one shot.
Emily Flinn, a deer biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, confirmed a doe with antlers was “definitely very rare.”
“Each year Missouri hunters take 250,000 to 300,000 deer and we only get a handful of antlered does reported to me,” she told the newspaper.
Most of the does have small horns, typically covered permanently in velvet. Russell’s deer had thick antlers that had been rubbed enough to removed nearly all the velvet.
