How to Grow Big Bucks Texas Style
How We Have Monster Bucks with David Kitner
 Editor’s
Note: Today, the concept of trophy-deer management or
quality-deer management is learned from how deer are
managed in Texas. To raise trophy deer like Texans do
on the land you hunt, you’ll need a lot of money,
plenty of land and numbers of trophy deer. This week,
we’ll take a look at Texas deer management, where
I hunted with Trijicon, a company that provides aiming
solutions for hunters, law enforcement and the military
with its various rifle scopes. Trijicon is supporter
of the Wounded Warrior Project (http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org),
giving a portion of each sale of Trijicon to this organization.
According to David Kitner, the Duval County Ranch manager,
“When Iarrived
at the ranch 8-years ago, the deer herd was in bad shape.
The area had experienced droughts and overgrazing by
cattle. We had low densities of deer in some areas and
overpopulation in others. I drew up a management plan
I thought would move the ranch forward, which included
ridding the ranch of cattle until the rain conditions
improved. I decided to reduce the buck harvest by insisting
we only take mature bucks. At that time, we harvested
numbers of immature bucks. Today, we basically hunt
management deer, which we define as bucks that are 5-1/2-years
old and score 140 to 145 or less on Boone & Crockett
(B&C). We don’t shoot spikes just to shoot
spikes. If we have an overabundance of deer on the property,
which we determine by a helicopter survey, then we shoot
them. But we don’t shoot the bucks until we’ve
conducted the survey. Our trophy bucks are left alone
until they’re at least 6-1/2-years old or older.
To take our trophy bucks costs the price of the management
hunt plus $200 per inch of antler over 145. We don’t
harvest really-big, mature, beautiful whitetails. We
leave those bucks in our herd until they die of natural
causes because we want these deer to pass on their genes
to future generations. Since I’ve been
managing the ranch, we’ve only harvested three
bucks that would score in the 180s, and those deer have
been taken within the last 3 years.
“Today, we have 10 or 12 bucks that will score
180 or better still breeding on our ranch. We protect
our breeding bucks at all costs. We want most of our
trophy bucks to reach 8- o r
9-years old. We have one monster buck we protected until
he was 11-years old. We called him “the Yard Buck.”
At 11-years old, the buck scored about 180 B&C.
Most people believe that as a buck grows older, the
quality of his rack diminishes. But I don’t believe
that. Our Yard Buck is a classic example of this assumption
not being true. That buck took care of himself, which
is the reason he lasted so long and had such good antlers.
Deer can live longer in the wild than most hunters believe.
We harvest a lot of bucks we consider management bucks
that are 8-1/2-years old that will score 120, 160 and
even higher. Aging deer past 8-1/2-years old is difficult,
but we know the Yard Buck was 11-years old because we
had video of him for at least that long. This year,
we’ll harvest 200 bucks and about 100 does. For
the previous 2 years, we had poor fawn crops, but this
year, we had an excellent fawn crop. Therefore, we want
to try to increase the number of deer we have on the
ranch by not harvesting as many does as we normally
would. This way, next year, our doe harvest should be
much higher than this year.”
For more information about the Duval County Ranch,
call David Kitner at (361) 394-6313, or visit www.duvalcountyranch.com,
or email DCR@wildblue.net.
To learn more about Trijicon, go to www.trijicon.com.
Tomorrow: Rewards of Conscientious Deer Management
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