Big Buck 411 Blog

Reaping What You Sow

Reaping What You Sow

By Mike Handley

Before Brook Current created food plots on the land that sucked up his life’s savings, he was fretting and worried his “piece of heaven” was more like a revolving door for wildlife.

He’d ponied up with his mother and brother to buy the 118-acre farm in Lucas County, Iowa, in 2017, and his prospects seemed marvelous at the time. The first indication came two months later, when he saw a great buck while hunting next to a hayfield.

“Close to sundown, six does came running out of the cedar trees into the field. They stopped, and then looked behind them,” Brook told Gita Smith, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “Soon, I heard two bucks fighting. And when the clashing stopped, a big buck chased a smaller 8-pointer into the open.

“Throughout the evening, the dominant buck tended the does. I sat there ’til dark, thinking, Someday, I’m going to get you. When the deer left, so did I,” he added

Brook passed up 15-yard chip shots at the buck twice that year. He found the deer’s sheds in the springtime.

A friend shot at the buck in 2018, but it ducked the string. A neighbor shot at it as well.

In 2019, because more deer were passing through the property than living there, Brook and a buddy created three food plots. The fields became buck magnets when the rut began.

Brook went to a hilltop fence crossing on Oct. 27. His stand was in a nearby white oak.

“The hilltop dropped into a drainage valley to my left. On the right was a 20-yard-wide, 1/2-acre food plot with clover, winter peas and radishes that ran about 150 yards. Behind me was a creek that held water the year ’round,” he explained.

He saw several deer that afternoon, the big one among them. It came through as daylight was fading, and it paused only a few feet away from Brook’s tree.

The shot was 7 yards.

After being thwacked, the whitetail jumped the nearby fence, looped 20 yards to the left, jumped the same fence again, and then disappeared into the draw. It stayed on its feet for another 60 yards.

Brook’s buck has not been taped for the BTR yet, but it was rough-scored at 184 6/8 inches. It took first place (archery typical) at the Iowa Deer Classic in March, which uses a B&C net score.

— Read Recent Blog! Low-odds Setup: New to the surveillance game, Brad VanderEspt put out two trail cameras in the fall of 2019, one monitoring a very deery location, and the other in a not-so-deery spot.

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