My Dad finally caught up with a buck we called "Mack Daddy" yesterday afternoon and he was a deer that's caused us lots of head scratching and sleepless nights of trying to figure him out. I'm still not sure we really figured him out, but he made a mistake in the daylight and Dad was able to capitalize on that mistake! Here's the story of "Mack Daddy"...
This buck showed up at the tail end of the rut last January and we instantly began wondering where he'd came from. We'd never gotten pics of this buck, much less had an encounter with him while hunting.
We have a ladderstand about 50 yds from this scrape, so Dad and I started hunting there more often after this buck showed up here. We never did see the buck, but I got 2 pictures of him at the scrape in the daylight on a weekday while we were at work.
The buck made it through hunting season and I started feeding the deer some corn to try to get them to drop their sheds nearby, but we weren't able to find this one's sheds...All Summer and early Fall, we wondered if this deer was still living on/near our farm, but I never got any pictures of him...I found some fresh scrapes on this same ridge (known to us as "Buck Ridge") in bow season, so I put a camera on the scrape and he was the first deer to show up on the camera!
Dad and I bow hunted quite a bit in this hardwood block, but never saw him...Over the next month, he began to roam a little bit and I got a few pictures of him on another camera closer to the center of our property. I always had a hunch that this deer lived in our neighbor's cutover and would travel down Buck Ridge as he checked these scrapes; eventually, ending up in our big foodplot...This is the last picture I got of him before the rut kicked in:
We never had a good name for this buck. We always seemed to say, "Well, that's a good 3 year old deer, but he doesn't compare to that Mack Daddy buck" or we'd say something like, "I wonder where that Mack Daddy giant buck's at or where's he traveling". So, the name Mack Daddy finally stuck.
Mack Daddy totally vanished for a month while rutting and we were afraid that he'd been killed. Much to our surprise, he showed back up at Buck Ridge on January 2nd
He frequented this scrape for the next 2 weeks, but every picture was at night.
Dad and I had a feeling that Mack Daddy would make an appearance in the daylight on our big foodplot, simply because so many does use this field. Well, yesterday afternoon, Dad was there waiting on him! Mack Daddy came out of the pine thicket chasing does and Dad laid the hammer down on him!!
Mack Daddy is our best buck ever from the farm and might be my Dad's best scoring deer ever (I'll probably score him tomorrow)...Nobody deserves this more than my Dad!!! Dad works his butt off at our place and he's had a rough year in general. Dad had neck/back surgery in the Summer, his half-sister passed away unexpectedly in November, and Dad's half-brother is very sick now too...I'm SO GLAD Dad killed this buck!!!!! Congratulations, Dad! I sure am glad I could be there to experience it with you!!
I always wondered what caused this deer's weird left side and we found the answer when we cleaned him. We found 6-8 small fragments of lead in the buck's left shoulder, where he'd been shot in the past. IMO, it looked like someone was shooting a ballistic tip and their bullet glanced off a limb before hitting the deer ???
