Big Buck 411 Blog

Nocturnal No More

Nocturnal No More

By Mike Handley

Four months after acquiring hunting rights to 6 acres next to a swamp in Licking County, Ohio, Mitchell Flowers got his first trail camera photograph of a buck he was sure would score more than 200 inches.

He was already thrilled to have collected images of several whitetails, including a 12-pointer he guessed would tally 175. He forgot all about that one after seeing the mid-October snapshot.

“In early November, when the rut started kicking in, I was hunting from daylight to dark,” Mitchell told Ed Waite, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “Very nice, mature deer tempted me every day. On Veterans Day, 150-inch-plus bucks tested me on three different occasions.

“Knowing a 200 was in the area, I just gritted my teeth and kept my finger off the trigger,” he added.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, while Mitchell was sick at home, the 200 walked past a camera in broad daylight. The timing indicated he might be alerting the buck every time he went to his stand.

He took a different route to his stand on the evening of Nov. 25. The buck showed at 5:02.

“I had sat in that stand so many times, I’d ranged and memorized every tree and opening,” Mitchell said. “When the buck turned broadside at 29 yards, I didn’t give it two seconds before I squeezed the trigger.”

Because several does were still in and near the food plot he’d planted, Mitchell remained in his blind until dark. Seeing the huge 12-pointer he’d originally wanted to shoot kept him there until 7:30.

When he returned to the area a couple of hours later with two family members, they found the deer about 80 yards away.

“I had 127 photos of the deer, mostly at night, over a four-week period,” he said. “That it finally came out during daylight was amazing. It was the first time during the entire season I actually saw it in the flesh.”

The deer has a BTR score of 201 6/8 inches.

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