WV Whitetail down

[ShootnMathews]

It's not one of the big ones that I have trailcam pics of, but my dad was starting to put some pressure on me to pull the trigger. So I decided to take this buck on the 3rd day of season. I used my Marlin XS7 which shoots sub 1/2 MOA to 500 yards with Nosler 95 gn BT bullets.

The buck was on the move when I saw it and he just kept coming right for me. As much as I like long range hunting, I'm not going to rush a long shot if he is coming closer. He came all the way in to 80 yards and stopped broadside to pick a few acorns and I put a perfect shot on him. He surprisingly ran for a whole 100 yards with a golf ball sized hole thru him. I'll post a pic of the exit later. He is just barely a 9 pt with the G4 being about .75" long on the one side.

 

[Dosh]

SM, maybe dad was hungry. Meat in the freezer is always welcome. Get the bigun next time.

 

[KYHILLJACK]

That's right. No matter how long you boil those antlers they never get tender enough to eat . Nice shooting.

 

[ShootnMathews]

When my dad was my age there actually wasn't many deer around. So you killed what you saw. He still has that line of thinking. I try to shoot 3.5 yr or older deer at the farm because I enjoy hunting big bucks. At 3.5 they are smart enough that they have a good chance of getting older. My dad also doesn't believe in shooting does for some reason which I don't agree with. I feel like the whole herd needs to be managed to maintain balance. One year because he hadn't seen any antlered bucks, he shot a button buck. That really ticked me off for a while. But that was the way my dad grew up.

Also, I left out in the original post, that was my .243 Win

 

[JOHNNIE WALKER]

Interesting post. My family is from Kentucky. Before there were deer there my dad and some friends would travel to Weat Virginia to hunt deer. That was in the 70s. They would go to the Canaan Valley. Now norhern KY is one of the best places I've ever hunted deer. Time changes things.

 

[ShootnMathews]

Interesting post. My family is from Kentucky. Before there were deer there my dad and some friends would travel to Weat Virginia to hunt deer. That was in the 70s. They would go to the Canaan Valley. Now norhern KY is one of the best places I've ever hunted deer. Time changes things.

Definitely. My dad told me once that deer were so scarce here that he was walking home from school and saw some deer tracks and then he ran the rest of the way home to tell his dad. And his dad didn't believe him.

 

[ShootnMathews]

I said in the original post that I'd post a pic of the exit. So here it is.

Also, not on this site, but elsewhere I read Some threads saying that Ballistic tip bullets were terrible hunting bullets and another thread about 243's not being powerful enough for hunting big deer. So for those people, this deer was dead in 15 seconds.

 

[JOHNNIE WALKER]

People are entitled to their opinion. But, a dead deer is a deer. Hard to argue with a picture like that.