TROPHY BUCKS: TO PAY OR NOT TO PAY

Other Tactics For Bagging That Trophy Buck

EDITOR'S NOTE: Regardless of where you live, how much money you make, how much you hunt, and how few bucks you've taken, you can find and harvest a trophy buck. But unless you have the very best of luck, you'll probably have to pay to hunt a trophy buck. The less you pay to take a trophy buck, the less likely that you'll discover one. The more you pay, the more likely that you'll bag that buck of your dreams.

Hunting Enclosures

Regardless of your definition of a trophy buck as far as antler size and body weight, you can take a buck of almost any size if you'll pay the price. At many enclosures, you can pay from $2,000 to $20,000 or even $50,000 to harvest that buck of your dreams. In most of these enclosures, you can sit in a stand no more than a half a day or a full day and bag the biggest buck you've ever seen. For hunters with more money than time, enclosures offer the quickest and easiest way to take big bucks. But generally, you'll have to pay a high price to bag that trophy.

Get Lucky

Mississippi hunter Jon Moss had hunted deer very little, but he went to a lease in Alabama with his brother-in-law, climbed into a tree stand overlooking a soybean field and harvested a buck that scored 259 7/8-B&C points -- one of the top-10 non-typical bucks in the "Boone & Crockett Records of North American Whitetail Deer." Unless you have luck like Moss, you'll probably have to pay to take a trophy buck.

Make The Choice

One type of payment for a trophy buck involves time, which equals lost earning power. The other kind of payment involves money, which equals stored earnings. Or, you can join a lease and put in time but not as much money as you'll spend at a lodge with a guide or if you hunt in an enclosure. However, you may not have as good a chance to bag a truly big buck on your hunting lease as you will if you hunt with a guide, at a lodge or in an enclosure.

By going through the process of deciding whether to pay or not to pay for a trophy buck, you need to make up your mind about how you define a trophy buck. Does a buck that you've hunted long and hard for over several years and finally bagged, regardless of the size of his antlers, count as a trophy? Or, does only a buck that scores more than 150 B&C points qualify as a trophy for you? Once you determine what makes a trophy buck, you then can decide whether to pay or not to pay to hunt him.

The Unseen Value of a Trophy Buck Hunt

Although many of us want to bag a big buck, we enjoy hunting for reasons other than just taking a trophy buck. We can't place a price on the time we spend...
* in a tree stand alone,
* in the woods observing wildlife and nature,
* away from the telephone, television and constant interruptions by people and neighbors,
* on a lease watching young bucks grow into old bucks,
* in the woods learning the ways not only of the big bucks we're trying to bag but also the other deer on the lease, * in the woods with family members watching future generations of hunters grow up,
* at the hunting camp learning from older family members and elderly hunting friends not far from their last hunts and enjoying their fellowship and camaraderie. The Trophy Buck Calculator doesn't figure in the importance or the value of this time in trophy-buck hunting.