Glenn
Dunning is a member of New England Outdoor Writers Association
(NEOWA) and contributes monthly to Outdoors Magazine
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Outdoor Magazine, September '03 issue, Traveling Outdoorsman col. Submitted by: Glenn Dunning |
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The Truth About Texas Whitetails |
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| Sitting there on the bench just outside the sleepy terminal at Laredo's Airport, it seemed a far stretch to imagine that I had started the day boarding a 737 at Burlington International. It was snowing and the temperature was in the single digits when I left, yet here in the high desert region of South Texas the temperature was in the high eighties with a light dry breeze. It was 4:30 in the afternoon on January 10th; it was also the peak of the whitetail rut in this part of the country. The area I would be hunting is in the southern most portion of Texas where it borders Mexico to the south and west and the Gulf of Mexico to the east. It's flat open territory with miles and miles of pear cactus and mesquite. In this part of the Southwest the temperature goes over 100 degrees every month of the year. Surprisingly there is very little public land. A small ranch by Texas standards is 5,000 acres and many spreads are in the hundreds of thousands of acres in size. Deer hunting is a business, as outfitting is anywhere and on those ranches where hunting is the primary revenue source, huge tracks of land are enclosed by high fences and the deer herd is managed for trophy quality. Ranches that are primarily cattle operations are usually low fenced as hunting is a supplemental source of income. In either environment there is so much land, so many deer and so little survival pressure from either hunting or predators that whitetail bucks have an opportunity to grow old, and when deer get old they grow big racks. While here in Vermont most of our bucks are between 1 ½ and 2 ½ years old, in South Texas an average buck is 3 to 4 ½ years old and six to seven year old deer are not uncommon. We were about an hour away from shooting light as ranch manager Larry and I headed down the sandero toward the shooting house that I would occupy on the first morning of my hunt. As we rounded a bend Larry said, "there's a buck". I spotted the stately animal just ahead of us. Preoccupied by a doe off to the side, the high-racked deer seemed reluctant to leap out of the beam of our headlights. By my standards this was a big buck with a perfectly symmetrical 8-point set of antlers. I asked the slow talking ranch manager if he considered that a shooter. In true cowboy fashion he looked at me and said, "guess that depends on what kind of deer you're after". In the last couple of minutes of our ride Larry explained that the deer we had just seen was a "management" buck. High fence operations manage the quality of their deer by selectively harvesting does and bucks of lesser genetic characteristics. The buck we had seen was mature, based on body size but probably would not have scored more that 120 or so. Not a trophy by Texas standards and so this was a deer to be culled. Over the next couple of days I saw 14 mature bucks, many of them venturing into the open in response to rattling (one of the most exciting hunting experiences I have ever had). Half supported antlers that easily won them entry into my personal big buck club and at least three and maybe four would probably have qualified for book at over 170 inches (except of course for the fact that Boone and Crockett does not recognize animals taken within fenced operations). The best hunting in South Texas is during the rut, which runs from mid December to mid January. Most hunts are only two or three days and start around $2000 including food and lodging. But here's the catch, the less expensive hunts are management hunts which means you are expected to harvest an animal with no more that eight points and scoring less than 130. For trophy quality bucks, a rule of thumb is to add $100 per inch on top of the $2000 for every inch over 130. Pricing of course varies with different outfits but using this formula a 160-class trophy would cost you about $5000 and that's pretty much in the ballpark. |
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