Local legend bucks can cause quite a stir in the communities they haunt. Hunters try to claim them and do just about anything to keep them on their properties. Every spring, they pray the special buck survived the season and lived to see\u2014and grow\u2014another year. Davey Stuckey, a 44-year-old retired Army infantryman, wanted the monster whitetail of Fayette County, Ohio as bad as the next guy. This buck had a 9-inch drop tine and a 2-inch antler growing out of his left eye socket. It took Stuckey four years, but on Oct. 31, 2022, he made local history.<\/p>\n
Stuckey found the buck\u2019s sheds in 2018, which rough-scored 187 inches without a spread measurement. But the buck always hung around one of the few farms in the area where Stuckey doesn\u2019t have permission. (The owners are close family friends but they hunt the land). Stuckey didn\u2019t see the buck again for the next two seasons, then saw him from the road in the spring of 2020, still on the same off-limits property.<\/p>\n
\u201cI watched him like that for another two years,\u201d Stuckey tells Outdoor Life<\/em>. \u201cIt was just heartbreaking seeing a deer like that where you can\u2019t even hunt.\u201d<\/p>\n Somehow, the Fayette County buck survived each fall. Things changed this year when the buck moved to a ditch on a farm just a half-mile down the road where Stuckey had permission. He kept his mouth shut about the discovery even as the local rumor mill churned.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were like six or seven guys hunting this deer,\u201d Stuckey says. \u201cThere were trail camera<\/a> pictures all over social media.\u201d <\/p>\n Stuckey immediately hung a trail camera near the ditch. Shortly thereafter, the pictures started flooding in. Stuckey realized he was staring straight at one of the buck\u2019s primary bedding areas, where he spent almost half his time. He\u2019d lay right in front of the camera for seven hours straight, moving very little during legal shooting hours. Then a cold front moved in, urging the buck to his feet. Stuckey grabbed his crossbow<\/a> and moved in. <\/p>\n \u201cThere were these 30 mile-per-hour winds one day, and I snuck up in this grass. I shot and missed at 30 yards,\u201d Stuckey recalls. \u201cThe grass is so tall and thick, and I think my expandable broadhead opened up in it. He didn\u2019t know what happened, he sort of ran up on me at an angle and looked around then trotted away.\u201d<\/p>\n The next day, the temperature climbed and the buck settled down again. But Stuckey knew the mornings would be a lot cooler. <\/p>\n \u201cI went straight across the ditch and hung a treestand off this finger that stuck out, and he started daylighting over there,\u201d Stuckey says. \u201cThe third morning I hunted him, he stepped out bumping some does, grunting and lip-curling, and I shot him at 53 yards. He went out about 20 yards into a cut-grass field and then bolted back into the ditch. I went down and he was just across the ditch in the wide open.\u201d<\/p>\n
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