While most of us are looking for the biggest and baddest bucks we can find come deer hunting season, tagging an unusual deer, like a piebald, is almost better than your run-of-the-mill trophy buck.
James Keel of Hernando, Mississippi tagged one of the strangest bucks we've seen this year: a dwarf buck with a full-size rack.
Keel was hunting in the North Mississippi Delta on December 16 when he tagged the tiny buck. It had been a slow morning, and Keel hadn't even seen a squirrel yet when, according to the Clarion Ledger, he saw a tiny buck chasing a doe. What's more, the buck had a huge rack.
Keel shot the deer and tracked it for 250 yards. The blood trail stopped, so Keel called dog handler Chad Meyers for some help. Meters brought his tracking dog, and that night the pair located the buck.
While Keel knew the buck was small when he shot him, he didn't quite know how small until he had the animal back in camp. He told the Clarion Ledger, "I was almost in shock at how small of a body he really was. When I held that deer up, Chad's dog was eye-to-eye with it. He was the size of a mature Lab."
According to Tate County Whitetails Unlimited, the dwarf buck only weighed 93.9 pounds but had 127 inches of rack. Its impressive rack is a main-frame 8-point with split G2s. The bases measure 4 4/8 inches and the main beams are 20 4/8 inches. The G2s are 8 6/8 inches and 9 inches with an inside spread of 14 inches.
A local processor estimated that the buck was 3 or 4 years old, and it came from an area where mature bucks frequently weigh 200 pounds. It's unsure why this particular buck was so tiny. There are stories of small species of deer being brought into Mississippi to restock the population in the past, and some speculate that these genes still crop up from time to time. More likely, it's a genetic anomaly that caused dwarfism in this particular buck.
Keel plans on having a full-body mount done of the dwarf buck, which he'll display in his home's future trophy room.
