Big Buck 411 Blog

Think Proximity

Think Proximity

By Mike Handley

After weeks of playing musical stands in 2014, his decisions based on trail camera photographs, Bo Holcombe finally spurned his unkillable buck’s three favorite dining rooms.

When the deer hunter from Brierfield, Alabama, widened his perimeter by visiting a fourth food plot on Dec. 13, he saw and shot the whitetail that had given him the slip for four seasons.

His choice of stands that day wasn’t so much a desire for a change of scenery as it was to give the other green fields a break. But he didn’t exactly throw a dart at a map of his 850 acres in Bibb County. The stand he chose overlooked the next-closest food plot.

Proximity, he reasoned.

“This buck – I called him The Ghost – would show up randomly at different locations on the lease,” he told John Phillips, who wrote the story for Rack magazine. “He was unpatternable.”

He was entirely nocturnal as well.

“The first photographs I got of The Ghost were when he was a 3 1/2-year-old 8-pointer in velvet. Those were the ONLY pictures I had of him during daylight hours,” Bo said.

In 2014, the buck alternately visited three different food plots at night. Bo rotated stands as well, hoping not to pressure the deer into looking for another zip code.

About 3 p.m. on Dec. 13, Bo decided to give the three food plots a break and hunt from the next closest field.

Nearly two hours later, a 6-pointer came to the green field. Ten minutes after that, The Ghost strolled onto the plot.

“I thought my heart would jump out of my shirt,” Bo said. “I was breathing as heavily as if I’d run a 100-yard dash. He was the biggest buck I’d ever seen, about 100 yards away, facing me and feeding.”

When the old buck was within 75 yards, it turned and gave Bo a broadside target. At the boom, the animal ran the length of the 4-acre field and collapsed. Bo says he heard the whump when the 250-pound deer hit the dirt.

The buck was one of the finest shot in Alabama that year. Its BTR composite score is 194 7/8 inches.

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