Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting The Legend of Giant Mule Deer

I have seen some whoppers!

I had one , the meat bags outweighed a calf elk.

When we were walking up to it my buddy accused me of mistaking a moose and shooting it.

We've been hunting our area for 16 years now, and fortunately have taken quite a few big bodied bucks. Not sure why the mature bucks get so big bodied in this arid environment, when the closest bucks to the West (Guadalupe's NM), and Southwest (Trans Pecos), and South of here the mule deer aren't nearly as big. Must be a genetics and food thing. Anyway, we used to weigh most of the really big bucks we killed before we gutted them when possible, and many weighed a bit over 300lbs. They looked alot like this guy.......

My god that’s a salamander necked sumbitch!!!

[quote=shrapnel




That reminds me of the story about the rancher who said......

"Lady, if you'll let me have my saddle back, you can have your deer!"

Regardless of 'HORNS', that is a horse.


Jerry

[quote=JGRaider]




WHOAH, that's a moose.


FELLAS, I've hunted 4 States in the South and for 47 years and I've NEVER even seen a deer in those categories.


Jerry

J G, thnx for that post.

It disappoints me greatly. He should have lost all credit and credibility !!


Jerry

About the only guy I know in Montana, Wyoming or Idaho who counts eye guards is originally from Oregon...

I grew up not counting eye guards at all, and nobody I knew did either, at least with mule deer. Some counted them on whitetails, but that's it. I think the main reason we don't count eye guards, especially on mule deer, is that somethings they're gone..sometimes they're on 3x3s or even 2x2s, but they're almost always really small. I've seen mule deer racks pushing 30" wide without a trace of an eye guard, and 18" wide racks with solid eye guards.

A basic 3x3 with small, mule deer style eye guards and a 4x4 without eye guards are both 4x4s? That's confusing.

A lot of our blacktail don’t have eyeguards either Ted, or have just a single...

I am in S.E. British Columbia and our count is one side without eyeguards. Boone and Crockett scoring is the defining measurement anyway.
A 180 typical mule deer buck is a good one around here. Tines are measured if you can hang a ring on it ordinarily.

Personally, I think a lot of the really big bucks, especially mule deer, that we see at big buck contests, in magazines and on the internet, are poached. Way more than we all think. There are so many big bucks poached here in SW Wyoming, it's kind of sickening. Every month it seems I hear about how the big buck everyone heard about that was killed up X creek last year, was actually poached up Y creek. They're often poached in hard to draw units, or on the winter range. Some folks in Idaho are just as bad. Posting public land to keep people out, rifle hunting in the archery season, putting general tags on draw unit deer, whatever. The greed runs high when it comes to mule deer.

To be perfectly clear: I am not saying I believe the more respected mule deer hunters on this board are being shady or being illegal. I certainly don't believe that is true.

Monster Muleys on the other hand......

Here's the photo of the Montana buck that Dwayne (BC30cal) mentioned early in this thread. We quartered it and packed it out on horses, so I have no idea of the exact weight, but did measure the body (am a compulsive measurer) and it was a little bigger than a 1-1/2-year-old cow elk my wife killed a couple weeks later. My guess is around 400 pounds on the hoof. I almost didn't shoot it because the body made the antlers look not all that big, but they gross-scored right at 200 inches.

Killed another that was about as big-bodied in Alberta around 15 years later. Didn't get to weigh that one either, but the boned meat weighed 130 pounds, and a general rule for deer is that live weight is around 3 times the boned meat.

A couple of biological rules affect deer weight, along with feed and growing season. One is latitude: Bergmann's Rule is that mammals tend to grow bigger bodies in more northern latitudes, though this decreases above about 60 degrees north latitude (the upper boundary of British Columbia and Alberta), because feed is reduced. In general, bigger bodies help animals retain more body heat in northern climes, so they survive and reproduce more.

The same applies to altitude, to a certain extent. The buck in the photo was taken just above timberline on the Rocky Mountain Front, and the other really big-bodied bucks I've taken in Montana have also come from around timberline in the western mountains. But that was the biggest.

No one around here counts the eye guards.......we all count the brow tines though.

If you said eye guards around here folks would think you were talking about safety glasses.

How's the mule deer hunting been on "unoccupied" federal lands?

😂😂

I grew up hunting the Sandhills where JG hunts and there are some big ones there. I killed one farther North and West a few years ago in Northern NM. I'm not much on measuring antlers but someone in our party measured it at around 170," which is not that impressive. What was impressive was the body size. I usually process my own but was in a hurry and stopped at my parents on the way home and dropped it off at the processer in Slaton, TX. They weighed it at 285 gutted with no hide, head nor horns. It was bigger than 4-5 of the Texas white tails put together laying on the floor. Still trying to eat that nasty buck.

I call him "Tiny"

https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php/galleries/13858707#Post13858707

Desertmuledeer, Good gracious what a toad! Funny how big they can get in that country isn't it? Another slug here.....

"Tiny" courtesy of Desertmuledeer.........

I've killed smaller cow elk.

NO offense intended.

B & C measures tines by the INCH. If it's not 1", it may be a deduct ?

The "ring" thing is used by some here but it's NOT official.


Jerry