Bagging a Whitetail on Opening Day in SC, Thanks to Moultrie

- By Rich Miller

Deer season opened in the low country of South Carolina this past Sunday and a good friend of mine scored on a super South Carolina buck. To make it even better he used one of the new Moultrie Game Spy cameras to get it done! A lot of people don’t want to fight the mosquitoes and gnats this time of year, but for the deer he is seeing I would probably sit through pretty much anything!

This story started about a month ago when Mark went to the store one Wednesday morning and bought three of the D-55IR game cameras. He put the cameras up with some corn in front of them that afternoon to see what might be in the area. Like all of us, he was anxious to find out what kind of pictures he was getting and he made it to Monday afternoon before he checked them. Between the three cameras, he had over 600 pictures. Although a few of them were hogs, most of the pictures were of some great bucks. He immediately called and e-mailied me the pictures and I couldn’t believe it either. They looked more like Midwest bucks instead of South Carolina deer. The good thing was over the next couple of weeks he kept getting more and more pictures of the bucks and they got more consistent. 

They were a lot of different bucks, but they were two of them that stuck out more than the others and caught Mark’s attention. One of them was a typical ten point with kicker points on his G2’s making him a twelve point while the other one was just a monster typical eight point. He was getting pictures of these two bucks every morning, noon and evening. The only problem he was going to have was getting to the stand without them being there. A couple of days before the season opened he separated all of his pictures to get an idea of what he was going to do opening day. After going through all of them and coming up with a plan, he headed into the woods on opening morning at 4:30 a.m. in hopes of beating the deer there. He made it to his stand and once he got there the deer were there, also. It was still an hour and a half before daylight. The deer were gone before he had enough light to shoot his bow and the rest of the morning was uneventful. He checked the camera when he left that morning and got some pictures of the big twelve looking up at him while he was climbing the tree. 

That afternoon he went into the woods around 4:00 p.m. and – you guessed it – the bucks were there again. Luckily, he saw them before they saw him and he just let them finish what they were doing and ease off. He said they looked his way several times like they knew something was there but he guessed they thought he was a hog. He finally made it up the tree and was a little worried that they wouldn’t come back. It was about 45 minutes before dark and he had yet to see a deer, and to make matters worse, there were lightening flashes and loud thunder getting closer by the minute.  With all of the thunder going on he never heard the bucks coming; when he looked down, the big twelve was almost under him. As you can imagine how a buck like that behaves, he acted like something was wrong and started easing off downwind trying to figure out what was going on. That is when he made his mistake that day, though. When he got about twenty yards out he turned broadside and looked back, giving Mark the opportunity he was waiting for – and Mark is deadly when it come to making a shot count. He put the arrow in about as perfect a place as a hunter could want. It was a good thing he did, though, because right after he shot the deer the clouds opened up and washed pretty much any sign he had away. The deer had only gone about sixty yards so there wasn’t much of a tracking job.

Mark called me shortly after he got the deer out and started talking about the hunt. He said that a lot of people would think that since he killed the deer on opening day that it was really easy, but what they didn’t realize was he had been working on this for over a month. He did tell me that even though nothing about taking a buck that size is easy, he would have never known he was there or when he was there without the help of the Moultrie cameras!