This buck thought he had cheated the system…
Last week, we saw a buck running around Oregon with Christmas lights tangled up in his antlers.
And in this weeks edition of bucks getting obscure objects tangled in their antlers?
An actual trail camera.
According to Outdoor Life, Jake Mitchell, a 22-year-old farmer and rancher in Kansas noticed that one of his trail cameras went missing in early November.
But, last weekend, he finally located the missing trail cam… tangled in an eight-point buck’s antlers.
Due to a lack of trees, Mitchell had to hang this trail cam on a fencepost, which bucks in his area tend to use as scrapes.
He told the outlet:
“I had four cameras up this season, and they were strung along a mile stretch on the northern edge of one of our fields. The deer come out of the sandhills into us because of the farm ground.
They like to feed out there on the milo stalks and the wheat. So, I try to catch them when they’re coming through to feed.”
He noticed that the fencepost where he had hung the trail cam was busted, but he assumed somebody had just seen it and taken it.
Four weeks had passed, and he almost forgot about the camera, until he went out for a pheasant hunt on December 3rd.
Mitchell had seen a massive muley the night before and still had a landowner tag left, so they were sure to bring shotguns and rifles with them.
They stopped at a vantage point and saw a decent buck with a strange rack a few thousand yards away.
Mitchell continued:
“He was just sitting out there in the CRP field on the neighbor’s land. I didn’t really think anything of it because he was so far out that you couldn’t really tell what was on his antlers.
I thought maybe it was a deadhead, or another antler that he caught from a fight.”
After their pheasant hunt, they came back to the same spot around 4:30 PM, where they spotted the buck again.
Mitchell looked through his spotting scope and was almost certain he could see his missing trail camera dangling from the buck’s antlers.
He recalled:
“I gave my spotting scope to my cousin and he’s like, ‘By God, that’s the camera!’ So it was on from there.”
He then proceeded to get within 80 yards of the buck. He didn’t have a clear shot, as the buck was covered by milo stakes, but he took it anyways and the bullet connected.
The buck went down after sprinting off for 200-yards. Mitchell walked up to it, and sure enough, saw the trail cam wrapped in its antlers.
He said the camera was busted and the SD card was gone, so he wasn’t able to get any photos of the buck’s journey after somehow getting the camera.
Mitchell concluded:
“The neighbor was giggling about it. He said, ‘We just saw him on camera with a camera, and we were like: ‘Who is that and where the hell did he pick it up?'”
