An Ohio Mega Buck on 18 Acres

Last deer season, Ohio hunter BA Starr gained access to a small, 18-acre property. He set trail cameras and soon captured photos of a nice buck with seven points on the left antler and a giant fork on the right.

Ohio hunter BA Starr gained permission to hunt a small farm last season, and it paid off with this world-class deer in October. Images courtesy BA Starr

Starr immediately thought his then-7-year-old son would love to take the buck, so they positioned a blind and prepared to hunt. They hunted multiple times, but never got a shot at the deer. The animal often appeared in the daylight on the trail camera on the days they weren’t hunting, but moved in the dark on days they hunted, even with their detailed scent-control program.

This past summer, trail cameras revealed that several good bucks were roaming the small property. Starr and his son were in the blind on Sept. 28, and that evening, his son took a nice eight-pointer, his biggest buck to date. With no sightings of the forked buck from the past season, Starr assumed it hadn’t survived the harsh winter.

Starr’s son took his best buck to date from the same blind just days before the big buck reappeared on camera.

A few days later, a giant buck showed up on Starr’s camera. After studying several photos closely, he recognized the unusual fork buried among a mass of antler on the buck’s right side. It was the buck his son had hunted the previous season, only it had grown substantially. Knowing he needed to hunt the deer before its pattern changed with the approaching rut, Starr headed to the blind.

After looking at the trail camera photos, Starr recognized the buck from the season before.

The animal appeared right at the end of legal shooting light, walking within 30 yards. The calm conditions allowed the thermals to carry the hunter’s scent down into the creek bottom. The buck lifted his head, caught Starr’s scent, and blew out.

“I was just sick,” he told. “I had blown what I feared was my only chance at this buck.”

On his first sit after the big buck, a shifting wind carried his scent to the big buck, but fortunately, the deer didn’t vacate the area

Luckily, second chances are a thing. Even though he didn’t hunt the following day, he was watching his cameras. That evening, the giant buck showed back up in the daylight.

The deer followed the same pattern for the next several days. On the days Starr hunted, it would wait until after he’d exited to appear on the trail camera. On the days he didn’t hunt, the buck showed during the daylight. It was a rerun of the buck’s 2024 pattern.

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A week after getting winded, Starr was in the blind when he saw the big buck fighting with another buck in the creek bed below.

“This was a fight like I had never seen before,” he explained. “It wasn’t just pushing and shoving; these two bucks were trying to kill each other.”

After the big buck won the fight, Starr watched as it chased the other deer out of sight and into the growing darkness.

Starr witnessed the big buck fighting with another buck on one outing. The buck was an old battler and had broken off two points.

On his next outing, Starr considered the buck’s tendencies. “I knew in my heart that the buck was watching me park and walk in. He knew when I was there,” he said.

So, he changed his pattern. Rather than parking in his normal spot, he pulled up to a different corner of the property next to an old block building. He parked so close to the structure that he had to fold in his truck’s side mirror. Then, he took a different route to his blind.

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After settling in, Starr sat tight in the breezy conditions. He’d forgotten the battery for his Ozonics unit and was at the mercy of the wind. The first deer to come in was a doe. She stuck around for 10 seconds, grew nervous, and left. Then, a young buck came in, fully alert. He kept leaving, then coming back, before finally leaving for good.

“I was really frustrated at that point and was considering heading out early rather than taking a chance on busting the big buck a second time,” Starr recalled.

Finally, the wind died down, and Starr decided to hang tight. With about five minutes of shooting light remaining, he noticed the big buck walking his way. The deer walked straight in and stopped just 21 yards away. Starr drew his bow, aimed, and released the arrow. The shot was good, and the buck crashed away, falling less than 50 yards from the point of impact.

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“It happened so fast that I immediately started questioning everything,” he said. “I thought, 'Was it the right buck? What if I didn’t look hard enough and had just shot a smaller buck?’”

He gave the buck about 10 minutes and could stand it no longer. He walked up to the downed deer, lifted an antler, and said to himself, “Oh my God, it’s him.” Even though he had taken several nice bucks ranging from 150 inches to over 170 inches in past years, this one was different.

When Starr walked up to the downed buck, he couldn’t believe the antler size.

Starr lowered the rack back to the ground and walked away. He walked back to his truck and called his wife and son to tell them about the deer. Then, he walked back to the deer and took a couple of teaser photos to send to his hunting buddies. A second time, he went back to his truck and texted his friends.

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“It was just a different type of emotion shooting a deer like this,” he said.

Starr knew the buck was big, but he didn’t know just how big until he sent a photo to friend and Buckmasters scorer, Shane Skinner.

“When he saw the picture, he told me he was meeting me at the house to score it right away,” Starr explained.

Once the scoring started, the inches kept adding up. With all 21 scorable points included, the rack came in at an astounding 197 4/8 inches. There were two broken points, meaning the buck would likely have eclipsed the 200-inch mark, had he not broken those off.

“I’ve never hunted a deer as hard as I did this one,” he said. “I spent more time in the blind than I ever have in a two-week stretch. If there were deer in front of me at dark, I’d stay in the blind until they left, sometimes late into the night. This one was special. Since my son and I both took our biggest bucks out of the same blind in the same season, we are getting my son’s buck and mine mounted together in a double pedestal mount.”

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