Talk about an empty feeling. We literally just came across this scene minutes ago while trying to film a D&DH TV segment here at our office. Our office is located within the city limits, but on the edge of where the city meets the country. We have a beautiful “back yard” so to speak that includes 5 acres of fields, brush and a few trees that lead way to city-owned river bottom. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and there are quite a few deer around here as well.
As I was walking with TV producer Ian Sanchez to find a spot out of the wind so we could film a segment for “Deer Talk Now,” I spied the ever-familiar white belly of a deer down in the river bottom. It was obviously a dead deer, and I told Ian we had to stop everything and go investigate.
My initial thought was the deer might have died on a trail down in that bottom after being hit by a vehicle (the road is less than 100 yards away), but as we got closer, I started to get a sinking feeling — mostly because the body was huge and I wasn’t seeing a rack whatsoever.
Yup, I was right. It was a buck, all right. And a big one, too. I’m going to just guess this was a 3- or 4-year-old buck. The bases of his antlers were big, probably 5″ circumferences. And, yup, someone had sawed them clean off with a hacksaw.
Even worse, there’s a bullet hole in his front shoulder.
I immediately reported the incident to our local DNR wardens. Highly doubt they will be able to figure out who did this, because the deer has been laying there for some time now (bloated and decaying quite rapidly). I can only guess as to what led to this monarch’s demise, and most of those guesses all come back to someone poaching this deer off of the nearby road and either not finding him right away or simply not wanting to get caught trying to drag that deer out of the river bottom.
If a poacher did, in fact, do this, it makes me more mad than sad. Poachers give us all a bad name. They are not hunters. They are selfish fools.
There is a chance, albeit a slight one, that the deer was somehow shot during the early October youth hunt (a weekend affair that allows gun-hunting), but even if that’s the case, the person who eventually found the deer did not follow proper protocol by alerting the DNR that they found the deer after it had already spoiled. I highly doubt that scenario, however, because of the location of the bullet wound and the distance the buck would have traveled to get to its final resting place (I’m guessing this is at least 300 yards if not 500 yards from the nearest piece of private ground where such a hunt would have taken place).
No matter what the circumstances, I’m pretty bummed right now. That buck deserved a better fate.
