Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting What Is It About 300 Pound Deer?

cool! i stand corrected. my apologies jocko

JDK there ya go....thanks, that's the rifle.

I knew it was older medium bore lever...

I loved the deer hunting stories from that era......that is such a great article.The stuff is so free of so much of the technology that we have today.Hard to beat those old Maine woodcutters in the deer woods,too, and how they explained things.....I hunted a few days back in the 70's with an oldtimer named "Don"....had a cabin back on the Harvey Siding Rd.....he was a great old guy and a really excellent woodsman. Suspect Hinckley was cut from the same bolt of cloth....

Biggest buck I ever shot was 208 pounds hanging weight and I killed him with a Ruger .44 mag carbine (the original version) but he was only 200 yards. Maybe if it had been a long shot I would have been better served with a super blaster.

200 yds!! did you have the front sight on the tree line?! lol

My pal holds up the head of the largest bodied mule deer buck I've ever seen. We took him out in pieces, so I have to only guess what he weighed....350lbs on the hoof? Taken with one shot from the pine scattered ridge in the background from 340 meters with a .260 and 139gr scenar.

looks like a Brahma bull with horns

I thought North American whitetail magazine had a article of a buck from canada that was more than 500 pounds live weight. The article showed a pic of the deer and it like a steer laying in the field. If I remember right it only had a big six point rack but the mass was unbelievable.

While I was trying to find the article I cam across this:

In 1926, Carl J. Lenander, Jr. took a Whitetailed buck near Tofte, MN, that was estimated at 511 pounds live weight.

Now that is a big deer if true.
Dink

Not the biggest deer I've kilt , but a nice one from last year. He had to be checked for CWD, as I was in a county where some had been found before. The biologist guesstimated him at about 240 live, 180 dressed.
I shot him on my uncle's farm, and we just used the tractor to put him in the bed of the truck. Nothing like farm equipment to make a hard job easier .
Missouri's farms can grow some fat-azz deer, especially if they aren't bothered too much. I've killed bigger bucks, with nicer racks, too, but this one seemed to have the boys at the meat locker pretty excited. They were shocked that I didn't want the rack, but I've got nicer racks, so it would have been in the way to keep it around.

Ya gotta listen to the old farmers, they KNOW where the deer are running. Uncle told me to "just go up on the hill behind the house, and watch, they're crossing there a lot". I did, and they did. Bang, end of story. .270 Winchester, of course.

Guesses as to weight on this one? Or score?



I took this pic about 5 years ago I think, or there abouts.


(And yeah, I know the answers.......grin)

I'll take a stab.

350# in the round, or 275 gutted. I haven't a clue on the points.

I got within about 40 yards of this huge bodied buck last Dec during the rut. His doe was just out of the picture, and is the only reason, along with some wind, that I got this close. Mature bucks in this sandhill country will typically weigh over 300lbs. live, 26" neck girth just under the ears, and 50-52" girth behind the front shoulders.

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It is irrelevant what you think. What matters is the TRUTH.

I have seen four in my life that sorta looked like this one;3 mule deer and one whitetail.

One was in Wyoming,and when he stood from the buck brush, his head was hidden and due to distance and light conditions, I thought he was a small elk at first....until his head came up,and I just gawked....it was obvious he was old and on the mend....rack on the downhill side.I did not shoot and killed a 30" 1/2 hour later from the same spot.

Another on the Peace River was dogging a doe, early November;not much rack, but I killed him because I knew I would likely never see another that size....he hog dressed 230# on scales in the butcher shop...I have no idea what that made him weigh alive.

The other two were also Alberta bucks;both,and especially the whitetail,are too painful to talk about...

I never get to see a mule that big down in the okanagan anymore. But it's pushing the 300 pound mark

without going thru all 34 pages in this thread, I am sure some one brought it up...

the largest whitetail supposedly ever taken was taken in Stearns County MN...and was taken with a lever action along the lines of a 30/30 or 32 Special...

largest one I ever took was taken in St Louis Co MN, about 30 miles north of Hibbing or 80 miles south of International Falls...it field cleaned at 265 and the DNR estimated it at about 340 to 350 on the hoof...

in Wisconsin one year, watch a friend from childhood of my best buddy shoot a 300 lb plus buck...

this was the guys first time deer hunting... he goes and buys a Browing BAR in 300 Win Mag, puts a $1000 Scope on top... flies his private plane up from St Louis... brings a buddy who is duplicating this for the first time also...

they show up with Eddie Bauer stuff from head to toe...

Shoot this big buck by 10 am... pay some local Wisconsin hunter they come across to gut it for them and then take it into town to the taxidermist... pay him $500 for his time and let him keep the meat... they fly out Sunday afternoon, and then the guy throws his new Browning in the paper to sell Monday...

his whole attitude... "well, I've been there and done that.."

oh and I forgot the deluxo pickup with ALL the bells and whistles that he rented for the weekend...

he had his secretary line all of the logistics up for this...

and was disappointed that there was no a Raddison Hotel in town...just a few local dives...and the restaurants had a lousy wine selection he was complaining about the next morning..

I believe here in WI the average age of deer taken is 2 1/2 years old and range just under 200lb dressed which makes them about 225lb live weight. It is not the size of the animal that can make them easy or hard to kill, it is there nervous system, witch WT are high strung and a sensitive system, where MD are a bit less fragle, and elk and bear even less.

Biggest one I have seen shot, taken 2 weeks ago by my 11 year old son. 238# dressed, on an accurate scale.

The average weight for a WI buck is far below 200lbs. It's pretty rare for them to get that big....they do every year, just not a bunch of them.

I watched a grown man throw a temper tantrum at the Butternut Feed Mill because his beautiful 150"+ deer didn't break the 200lb mark. He was SURE it was over 225 dressed. It was 190, which is nothing to shake a stick at, btw.

The longer the drag, the heavier they get.

200 pounds dressed is a big deer. I shot a BIG buck that was bigger than me (I'm 6-1, 195), but, when hanging from a pretty accurate scale, he field-dressed mid 170's.

tzone is correct. I had to drag it a ways. It musta started out lighter.......

I shot a whitetail buck in Maine several years ago that field dressed 254#, live weight estimated to have been 330-335#. A single 180gr. Hornady RN from my Winchester M/88 .308 did the job on this heavily palmated 11 pointer.

Slightly off topic but..

Just as a little trivia the heaviest doe I could ever research that could was well documented (weighed at a check station, fish and game employee etc...) was killed in Louisiana and weighed just over 300 pounds live weight. I believe it came out of the three rivers area out of a soybean field.

I'm sure there have been heavier ones and most probably ones from further north but that's the closest I could come up with as an offical weight of one thru a couple of years of looking and reading about 10 years ago.



This is the largest bodied deer I have managed to kill in the south. Not big by northern standards at all. Pretty big deer for living in a pine plantation on public land in the south all his lfe however. He actually outweighed my neighbors deer killed within 500 yards of this one the same year that scored 198.5" B&C non typical. His deer was one year older, possible these two were in a bachelor group a few years prior.



Somewhere I have a pic (I'll have to find it and scan it) of a pretty hefty doe I killed. She had some funky stuff going on however. She was lactating in early bow season and was with a fawn when I killed her...but she had little button antlers that were about 1/4" tall and broke the skin. I don't know if half and halfs count

But back on topic it's rare to hear someone down here discussing weight of a deer unless it's really out of the ordinary. When I worked with deer clubs we required them at first to estimate deer weight for 2 years and then required them to actually weigh dressed deer (with a scale we provided) as a requirement for getting additional harvest tags for both bucks and does. The average weight of deer took about a 30% nosedive the year we went to actual weighing as opposed to estimating We should have done the same with antler size as well just to see how far off they were.