Smart Management Pays off with 186-Inch Monster Buck

Wisconsin bowhunter Jake Ede and his family have worked hard to improve their hunting property, and this big buck is the fruit of their labor. Image courtesy of Jake Ede

Improving the wildlife habitat and hunting on your own land brings immense satisfaction, especially when the labor and rewards are shared with your family. Jake Ede, his father, and his brother have been working on a large tree planting project on their Wisconsin property over the past six years.

The land has been in the family for a long time; Jake’s parents purchased it in 2005 from his great-grandfather. It’s primarily open ground, but with two timber blocks, each about 12-15 acres in size. The tree plantings have already boosted the property’s whitetail allure, and it should keep improving as the trees mature.

“We’ve mostly planted pine and spruce, but we’ve also planted oak, chestnut, apple and pear trees, too,” Ede detailed. “There are a couple of sections of CRP that were previously crop ground. And we’ve put in a few food plots and two ponds.”

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The property’s big-buck production has been something of a slow-drip process. All three hunters have taken nice bucks here and there in the 130 to 150 class. But this year, a world-class whitetail was roaming the area.

“We run about a dozen Tactacams on the property,” Ede explained. “About 8-10 of them are set in the same locations year after year on food plots and ponds. We experiment with the remaining cameras to see if we can track down any overlooked spots.”

Those cameras revealed a nice buck in 2023, a deer that wasn’t a shooter but had great potential. It packed on many antler inches from 2023 to 2024, and in 2024, it was on the trail cameras frequently. And the three hunters each encountered the animal but were unable to connect.

The buck’s movements in 2025 were somewhat sporadic compared to 2024. Image courtesy of Jake Ede

“This year,” Ede said, “he wasn’t as frequent on the trail cameras as in 2024. He began coming around in mid-summer and showed up here and there. We have a pond that we dug in each of the two timber blocks. Most of the deer on the property hit those ponds, especially in the summer. But for some reason, this buck never did in 2024 or 2025. He was hanging around a food plot bordering one of the blocks of timber, so we focused our hunting efforts on that end of the farm.”

From the mid-September opener through early October, Ede hunted a handful of times. He saw some small bucks and lots of does and fawns, but the big boy was a no-show until the temperatures fell on Oct. 6.

“My brother and I both snuck away from work early that afternoon,” Ede told. “It had been pretty warm the week before, but the temps had fallen about 15-20 degrees. We had a good feeling the deer would move. I jumped into a blind that overlooks the food plot where the buck was on the trail camera the most, and my brother hunted another spot. I saw pretty early movement. A yearling buck was first to come out, and then two big does and a fawn fed through the plot.”

The plot, by the way, is on the inside corner of the adjacent block of timber. It has a clover section and a brassica section, and the clover juts back into the timber, making it a natural runway for the deer to enter the plot as they exit the timber.

“About an hour before dark, I heard a little twig snap to my right where the clover goes back into the woods,” Ede said. “I saw the big buck standing at the edge of the clover about 35 yards away, facing directly at me. My brother and I try to film our hunts, so the first thing I did was hit record and point the camera out the blind window all the way to the right. He walked right into that window and stopped perfectly broadside, 25 yards away. I wasn’t quite ready yet and still had all of the windows closed.”

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Carefully, Ede opened a window in the direction the buck was heading. He was ready to draw his bow, expecting the buck to stop and feed in the brassicas. But it kept walking.

“Because he didn’t stop,” Ede said, “I opened the far-left blind window. By the time I did, I knew that he was beyond 30 yards, so I grabbed my rangefinder. When he finally stopped, I ranged him. The distance was 37 yards, and I adjusted my single-pin sight. That is the farthest I wanted to shoot, so I didn’t mess with the video camera. A few more steps, and he’d be out of range.”

Ede drew and launched his arrow. He immediately knew that it connected.

“I felt good about the shot, and it sounded good on impact,” he remembered. “I didn’t see it hit, but I saw my arrow sticking out of him as he ran away. Height-wise, it looked good, but I was concerned about the penetration. He ran through the food plot and disappeared into some tall grass across the plot.”

After calling his brother and dad, Ede sat tight, watching a doe and a fawn feed in the plot. Darkness fell, and he left the blind, convening with his brother, dad, uncle and some buddies to discuss the encounter and hit.

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“We almost waited until the next morning,” Ede said. “But we decided to go look for blood and track up until where I had seen him disappear, then decide from there. We found blood in the plot, and it was easy to follow. We elected to proceed, but we found tracking a bit difficult when the blood trail led us into the tall grass.”

The bruiser whitetail sported exceptional mass, long beams, and loads of character. Image courtesy of Jake Ede

One of Ede’s buddies pointed out some blood at shoulder height and even above head height in some places.

“We immediately felt better about it,” he said. “It’s a little swampy where the buck had gone. We just turned the corner around a hill, and one of my buddies spotted my green Lumenok. We turned off our flashlights and watched the nock for a bit to make sure it wasn’t moving. It didn’t move, so we crept forward. When we were about 20 yards away, we saw that the buck was piled up. I had been really nervous ever since taking the shot, so my excitement finally came out once we found him.”

The buck is the largest the Edes have ever taken. It sports exceptional mass, with the left antler base measuring nearly seven inches in circumference. Both main beams are about 25 1/2 inches. The inside spread is about 19 4/8 inches, and both G-2s and brow tines are split. With kickers off the G-3s and some junk off the bases, the gross score tallies 186 1/8 inches, making the buck a perfect complement for all of the work the Edes have poured into their hunting property.