Big Buck 411 Blog

Low-odds Setup

Low-odds Setup

By Mike Handley

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. The Kentucky bowhunter thought the latter was likely a waste of time, but he did it anyway.

You can guess which one photographed the behemoth that’ll soon be hanging on his wall.

“I didn’t really expect to get much, if anything, on the one closest to some houses on a small tract in a residential area,” he told Dale Weddle, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine.

Halfway into November, he checked the low-odds cam and found a giant among the images. It had come through at night, but it soon began walking past the lens during the day.

Brad had set up a ground blind there in September, never expecting to spend much time in it. It wound up as his primary spot.

Sixteen days after the deer was first photographed, it passed through just an hour before Brad checked the camera.

Even an unfavorable wind couldn’t keep him away from the blind the next day.

About 3:15, he heard a deer grunting to his left, downwind. The vocal buck was an 8-pointer, which ignored the breeze and went straight to the corn.

As it fed, a second buck grunted. It, too, was an 8-pointer. The two 4x4s left together. Thirty minutes later, yet another grunting buck, a 6-pointer, came and went.

“I heard more grunting to my right at 4:45,” he said. “I could see the body of a deer and then a flash of antler in the thick stuff about 25 or 30 yards away. I’m thinking, It’s one of the bucks I’ve already seen, coming back.”

He was wrong.

The next few minutes are forever etched into Brad’s mind.

The buck came to the corn. Brad remembers a strand of saliva leaking from its mouth. He remembers having the wherewithal to wait for the perfect angle, even though the deer was RIGHT THERE and completely unawares.

He also remembers phoning home afterward.

“When I called my wife, she put me on the speaker phone with the kids,” he said. “One of them said, ‘Dad, are you crying?’ and I said, ‘No, I just can’t breathe.’”

The Oldham County 17-pointer has a BTR score of 199 3/8 inches.

— Read Recent Blog! Do I Stay, or Do I Go? At 188 4/8 inches, the Illinois bruiser is No. 5 among the Land of Lincoln’s crossbow-felled Irregulars.

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