You’ve probably heard the phrase “ground shrinkage” as it relates to buck antler size. It happens when an excited hunter shoots a buck and then the animal runs off. When the hunter eventually finds the dead buck, the rack looks smaller than they remember.
The opposite happens in the YouTube video below.
Jacob Miner explains how he bought his first hunting property, a 35-acre Iowa tract, consisting of 60 percent timber to 40 percent open areas (warm-season grasses), with a wooded draw down its center. He installed food plots around the property edges, and stayed out the wooded interior in hopes one or more mature bucks would bed there. Smart.
He pursues deer on other private property during October and the first half of November, but experiencing little success, he decides to roll the dice and hunt deep on his own land in late November. He places a hang-on portable in a bottleneck on a ridge, with plans of sitting in the stand dark to dark the following couple days.
Because rutting whitetail bucks are still looking for a doe in heat, he calls and rattles aggressively. Little to no wind makes the sounds carry a good distance. Even though it’s Iowa, and Miner fully understands that mature bucks can show up anywhere at any time, he never dreamed a buck of this size would respond looking for a fight. (Be sure to turn up the video volume to hear the buck’s footfalls. Awesome!)
Miner stops the walking buck with a voice bleat, then makes an ideal double-lung shot from close range. After the buck charges off, he says, “Are you kidding me? That might be a 170-inch deer!”
As I said previously, there is no ground shrinkage with this buck — just the opposite. In the treestand, Miner is overwhelmed to think he might have just killed a 170-inch whitetail with his recurve, but the buck is actually in the 190-class.
This video is a good reminder you don’t have to own or have permission on a large parcel to experience big-buck success. The key is hunting smart.
Equipment FYI: Miner was using a 50-pound-draw custom recurve, with a Victory CarbonTrad arrow (450 spine) tipped with a 125-grain Zwicky Eskimo broadhead. He called in the rutting buck with an Extinguisher Deer Call and the Black Rack Rattling System from Illusion Hunting Systems.
