The state of Michigan gained a new No. 3 (irregular) whitetail among rifle harvests last season.
The name beside the impressive 16-pointer is Tom Fogarty Jr. of Benton Harbor, who had neither seen nor heard about the deer until it emerged from a creek bottom on the opposite side of the wooded pasture he was hunting on Nov. 18.
Tom was sitting inside his favorite elevated box blind when the buck with a death wish gave him the opportunity to claim his first southern Michigan deer with a rifle. To that point, his firearm of choice had been a semiautomatic shotgun.
“I could tell this deer was a shooter the minute I saw it,” he told Richard P. Smith, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “My rangefinder revealed it was at 153 yards.”
Not one to waste time counting points, Tom rested the rifle on the blind’s window ledge, aimed at the animal’s chest, and squeezed the trigger.
“The buck went 40 yards and dropped,” he said. “I didn’t know exactly how big it was until I got up to it. I had guessed it was a 10-pointer.”
The extremely long sticker points resemble an elk’s brow tines. They’re more cowcatcher than character points.
The number and shape of the points aren’t the only attributes that push the deer into the No. 3 spot. The mass measurements account for nearly 48 inches of its Buckmasters score of 210 6/8, thanks largely to bases of 9 5/8 and 7 inches.
The deer was even bigger a few weeks before Tom encountered it.
According to a neighbor’s trail camera, the estimated 5 1/2-year-old had broken off a 6- to 8-inch drop tine since it was photographed during the summer.
— Read Recent Blog! ‘Dumbest Buck in America’: With a Buckmasters score of 194 inches, dumb or not, Clay Kiteley’s 15-pointer is the new Alabama record among crossbow-felled Semi-irregulars.