Big Buck 411 Blog

Rain Man

Rain Man

By Mike Handley

Pete Alfano isn’t the type to just ring the dinner bell and wait for a shootable buck to appear. Nor does he simply manage the resident whitetails by field-judging deer before squeezing the trigger.

If he thinks it’ll help, he’ll climb into the seat of a mini-backhoe and mold the land. For example: No water, or not enough? No problem.

The 45-year-old cofounder of Whitetail Properties, a real estate company specializing in hunting, ranch and farmland, lives in Oak Grove, Minnesota, but he spends much of the fall hunting deer in Kansas.

Pete retrieved the first trail camera photo of his latest whopper in 2019. Going into that season, he felt reasonably confident he’d patterned the deer. He thought shooting it would be a piece of cake.

Things didn’t work out that way, however, because the deer altered its routine after shedding its velvet. Pete encountered the fickle deer only once that year, and he wasn’t carrying a bow.

He was in his Jeep, heading out to pull a card from his Reconyx camera, when he turned a corner found himself 20 yards from the very buck he was hoping to see among the images. After gawking at each other for a few moments, the deer turned around and left.

“That deer haunted me for the rest of the year,” Pete said. When the season was over, I looked for its sheds. I found 180 of them that spring, but not that one’s.”

Pete was elated when the deer returned to the property a few months later. He believes it spent the away time at a farm 5-7 miles distant.

That summer was a dry one, particularly compared to the previous year’s. The buck came to drink from a water tank regularly.

To increase his odds, Pete used a mini-backhoe to create a circular pond to catch and hold the overflow. He also set up a ladder stand on the only tree in range.

On the fourth day he sat in it in September, his work paid off handsomely with a drop-tined buck that has been rough-scored at 200 3/8 inches. Footage of the memorable hunt should be released soon.

— Read Recent Blog! How to Christen a Crossbow: The 28-yard shot was easy-breezy, a guarantee the animal would not grow a fifth rack. Its fourth has a BTR score of 185 7/8 inches.

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