Phillip Taylor of Rock Mills, Alabama grew uninterested in looking his window and seeing the identical deer consuming the fruit off his apple and pear bushes each week. So he referred to as on his 16-year-old grandson, Coye Potts, to treatment the scenario together with his crossbow. When Potts noticed the deer for the primary time, he realized it wasn’t a median Alabama buck, however as an alternative a 10-point crimson stag.
“Golly, that thing is huge,” Potts advised the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer about his first thought after seeing the deer. “It don’t look like no whitetail.”
Potts took to his grandpa’s area on Nov. 3 and arrange in a home made floor blind. When the stag got here out, Potts at first struggled to make the shot, for the reason that stag had a feed bag trapped in its antlers obstructing its vitals. But ultimately, Potts arrowed the deer by way of the guts from 32 yards, a lot to the joy of his grandpa and searching buddy, Hudson Vowell. This was, in any case, Potts’ first profitable hunt.
But the story of crimson deer in Alabama—and this one specific stag in Randolph County—was removed from over.
Red deer are native to Europe and Asia, not the United States. Their antlers look much like these of an elk and their our bodies dwarf American whitetails. Their unique look and excessive adaptability to their environment makes them a well-liked animal within the high-fence searching and sport farm world.
The indisputable fact that there was a crimson deer roaming east-central Alabama may solely imply one factor: there’s a gap in a fence someplace. According to Marianne Gauldin, a conservation eduction specialist with the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, one or two hunters bag a crimson deer each season within the Cotton State. There are a few dozen searching lodges and sport farms inside a 25-mile radius of Rock Mills, and whereas none of them promote crimson deer searching, experiences of a roaming crimson stag in Georgia made the information final yr. With that stated, Potts, Taylor, and Vowell are nonetheless ecstatic.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Vowell stated. “I don’t think I’ll ever see another deer that big or a red stag in general that someone didn’t pay for, walking around in Alabama freely.”
East Alabama Deer Processing proprietor Justin Benefield drove to his store early to assist Potts get the deer within the cooler. Benefield advised the Ledger-Enquirer he and a few buddies had been speaking in regards to the crimson stag simply the night time prior, and that the deer had been recognized within the space for seven or eight months. When he discovered Potts had shot it, he was blown away.
“Man, this is the luckiest kid alive. In the state of Alabama, you just don’t get that opportunity, a hit-the-lottery type of thing,” Benefield stated. “There’s no telling on a paid hunt how much it would cost.”
Potts is usually excited in regards to the meat and the shoulder mount, which he’ll cling in his household’s residence.
“Every time you walk by it, it will just bring back memories,” he stated. “You just feel an accomplishment.”