A deer hunter in Kansas had one in every of his path cameras go lacking in early November. He ended up discovering it final weekend in one of many strangest locations possible: tangled across the antlers of a whitetail buck. The hunter bought his digital camera again, however solely after he shot the eight-point shutterbug.
Jake Mitchell, a 22-year-old farmer and rancher, says the property the place he grows crops and runs cattle in southwest Kansas is typical for that a part of the nation. It’s wide-open and windswept, with nary a tree in sight. And as a result of he doesn’t have any blinds or feeders arrange on the property, he says the perfect (and actually the one) place to hold a path digital camera is on a fence publish.
Spoiler alert: Mitchell explains that since there aren’t any bushes for them to work, the native bucks additionally have a tendency to make use of these fence posts as scrapes.
“I had four cameras up this season, and they were strung along a mile stretch on the northern edge of one of our fields,” Mitchell tells Outdoor Life. “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.”
Mitchell makes use of conventional path cameras, and when he went out to drag SD playing cards on Nov. 7, he seen that one in every of his 4 cameras had disappeared. He additionally noticed that the fence publish it was on was busted, however he simply figured any individual will need to have seen the digital camera and brought it.
Four weeks handed, and Mitchell had just about forgotten concerning the lacking path digital camera by the point his cousin got here out for a pheasant hunt on Dec. 3. Mitchell had noticed a monster muley buck the evening earlier than, and he nonetheless had a landowner tag, so they’d shotguns and rifles with them within the pickup. They stopped at a vantage level to glass that morning and noticed an honest buck with an irregular rack a pair thousand yards away.
“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 pheasant searching all afternoon, Mitchell and his cousin returned to the identical spot round 4:30 p.m. they usually noticed the identical buck once more. This time, the deer was a lot nearer, and when Mitchell regarded by his recognizing scope, he was fairly certain he might see a path digital camera dangling from one in every of its antlers.
“I gave my spotting scope to my cousin and he’s like, “By God, that’s the camera!’” Mitchell says. “So it was on from there.”
Determined to get his digital camera again, Mitchell dropped down right into a draw and bought inside 80 yards of the buck. He didn’t have an excellent capturing lane—the buck’s physique was coated up by milo stalks—however he pulled the set off anyhow and the bullet linked. The shot hit a bit of farther again than he would have favored, however the buck expired after a 200-yard dash, and Mitchell walked as much as discover his path digital camera wrapped up round its proper fundamental beam.
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He says the digital camera was busted and the SD card was gone, so he didn’t get any images documenting its unusual, circuitous journey. But when he known as his neighbor on the telephone to elucidate what occurred, the neighbor informed him he was effectively conscious of the digital camera thief and had photograph proof on his personal path cameras.
“The neighbor was giggling about it. He said, ‘We just saw him on camera with a camera, and we were like: Who’s is that and where the hell did he pick it up?’”