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Patterning a whitetail who solely seems on digicam at evening can really feel like a tall order. Simply ask 35-year-old Jeff Ankley, who shot a novel nontypical he nicknamed “Captain Hook” on his land in northern Illinois this fall after solely seeing the buck in daylight twice in three years.
Ankley and his spouse, Caitlin Munson, saved up and bought 5 acres of wooded land adjoining to their half-acre house in 2020. On the time, Ankley didn’t understand that the land they’d purchased was formed like an hourglass, surrounded by extra suburban areas and making a small however best deer sanctuary. The next searching season, Ankley arrange path cameras and began getting footage of decent-sized bucks — together with one significantly huge nontypical who was virtually utterly nocturnal.
“He piqued my curiosity primarily as a result of he had hooks coming off his G2s,” Ankley tells Out of doors Life. “He was a younger deer, I estimated him to be about 3.5 years previous at the moment. He solely got here round at evening, and we’d get footage of him randomly. He confirmed up as soon as within the daylight that yr, after which he utterly vanished.”
Ankley didn’t see proof of him once more till 2022, when a path digicam captured a daylight photograph of the buck on Oct. 31.
“Then he vanished once more, and we didn’t see him once more for the season,” Ankley says. “Then, going into this deer season, we put our cameras out mid-August and didn’t get any footage of him till the second week of November. At that time I didn’t even know if he was nonetheless round. We had been near some forest reserves that had been getting culled, so I didn’t know if he obtained [killed by another hunter] or moved on and located a brand new area of his personal. However after I obtained that image I used to be decided.”
On Nov. 18, Ankley arrange in his stand on the south facet of his property. Final mild was creeping up on him. Round 4:40 p.m., Ankley heard sticks breaking behind his tree.
“I rotated, grabbed my bow, and certain sufficient I see him coming down a thicket line considerably within the open,” Ankley says. “There have been two totally different goal bucks we’ve been chasing this yr. I knew it was both a kind of bucks based mostly on tine size.”
The buck closed to 23 yards. Ankley predicted the deer would hop on a path that ran parallel to Ankley’s stand.
“I had one capturing lane on [that trail], possibly two toes in diameter,” he says. “I knew if I ended him in that spot I used to be going to get a shot. So when he obtained about three steps in there I drew my bow again. He stopped simply previous the opening, far sufficient to the place I couldn’t actually see his head, however I knew he was a shooter. I took the shot. He reared up and kicked, ran out about thirty yards, and stopped out in some marsh grass behind a bunch of brush. I bear in mind pondering to myself, I simply killed the largest deer of my life.”
Ankley waited about 45 minutes and climbed out of the stand to return house. He and Munson finally went out to select up a blood path.
“We discovered respectable blood proper off the bat the place I’d shot him. As we began monitoring the blood path obtained thinner, we noticed a spot the place it regarded like he bedded down, so we made the choice after about an hour and a half of monitoring him to drag out. I didn’t sleep nice that evening.”
The pair went again out the subsequent morning proper round dawn to select up the path once more.
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“We began the place we had left off, and I’d say 30 to 40 yards from there was the place we discovered him. I walked up and was simply dumbfounded,” Ankley says. “I couldn’t imagine I’d killed this buck I’d been chasing for 3 years, and I had no concept it was even him. It was a extremely, actually thrilling second for me.”
Ankley took a inexperienced rating twice and feels assured that Captain Hook will find yourself a 190-class deer. When he took the buck to get examined for CWD, the biologists aged him at 5.5 years previous. As soon as the 60-day drying interval is over, Ankley plans to get the buck shoulder-mounted.
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