Whenever Brock Creel and his father want to trade steel shot for duck breasts, they go to their duck hole, a beaver pond in neighboring Madison County, Alabama.
An easy drive from their Decatur home, the pond is on a 15-acre tract that serves little purpose other than to attract woodies and mallards. Now 19-year-old Brock has another reason to go there.
Based purely on the discovery of a deer trail flanking one of the creeks that feed the duck hole, Brock set out a trail camera in 2019.
The first photo he collected showed four does. The next one was a nighttime shot of an incredible buck that made him count the days until bow season.
“The buck was so big that I could hardly believe it was real,” Brock told John Phillips, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “My dad and I hadn’t planned to hunt deer on that woodlot. It’s only 100 yards from a small neighborhood.
“Once I saw this deer, I forgot about duck hunting and started making plans for bow season.”
The first time the buck mugged for the camera while the sun was up (barely) was two days before the season opened on Oct. 15.
Two weeks later, on a Sunday, Brock went to his treestand at 1 p.m. He could hear children laughing, music and dogs barking from the nearby neighborhood.
“I never would’ve believed that I would encounter a trophy buck so close to civilization,” he said.
About an hour before sunset, two does came through and hung around for 45 minutes. Moments after they hurriedly left, Brock saw the reason: The bull of the woods, bigger in the flesh than it had seemed in the photos, was approaching from the same trail, nose to the ground.
Brock shot it as soon as its head passed behind a tree. Although he pulled the shot to the right a bit, the deer lunged forward for only 10 yards before collapsing. The bolt’s broadhead apparently severed an artery.
Even with extra backs and brawn, the 70-yard drag to the nearest road took more than an hour.
At 179 4/8 inches, the 18-pointer is the second-largest whitetail ever recorded from Madison County.
— Read Recent Blog! Seeing Double: Bill Funk saw two world-class whitetails, side by side, while hunting in Alberta last fall, but only one was real.