The Saga of Splitbrow

Our history with Splitbrow began way back in 2008 - my first year of running Cuddeback Captures. I set a camera over the scrape on the top of the hill under some century old oak trees. Almost every year there was a well used scrape underneath the oak on the west side of the hilltop. I hung the camera on the afternoon of October 28th, 2008. Immediately the buck pictures came pouring in. I had 15 different bucks hit that scrape in the month that the camera was up. There was everything from yearlings to 4+ year old bucks using the scrape with most bucks being 2 and 3. A small basket rack 8 point, two which nobody would pay attention, made his way to the scrape on the 20th of November for the first time. He had the rack of a two year old and the face of a fawn. We learned later that he must've been a late born fawn. His body was small, but I didn't want to over estimate his size so I assumed he was a 2 year old in 2008.

The next season, on November 2nd at 4am, we got two pictures of a buck that looked familiar. This buck had a typical 9 point frame with a split brow tine. It took me a while to connect the dots that this was the same deer, but it was because of his forward facing brows and short face that I knew it was him. So now the buck has a name - Splitbrow.

We got a couple more pictures of him in 2009, but that was about it. We couldn't really patten him or find much of a range, which I'm now learning is typical of a 3 year old.

A neighbor picked up his sheds that spring.

In the summer of 2010, at the same camera I started getting pictures of Scabby along with many other future hitlist bucks, I got a few pictures of Splitbrow. Some in July and a few in August.

Then he disappeared until October 15th. We caught him on the same logging road we did the year before at 10:15am - kind of an odd time to be moving that early in the fall. Must've been a doe that came into heat because there were two bucks that came by there that same morning at 6:30am.

We didn't pick up on Splitbrow at all again until November 10th at the scrape on the top of the hill. It was raining and his antlers were all slicked up.

We got another picture of him back at the scrape by the lone oak just a little ways to the west (kind of an alternate scrape). He came by at 10:00pm on the nose and this probably remains the best picture of him overall.

He definitely was mature, we thought 4.5. We never got any more pictures of him again, which was odd. The same neighbor managed to pick up his left side from that year in the spring.

The summer of 2011 came quickly and we decided to start a few new mineral sites. We hung a camera over one of them on the oak ridge and in the first half of June we got lots of pictures of ol' Splitbrow.

Then he disappeared and I fully expected to pick him back up in the Tweeten woods where he had frequented the summer before. Not the case. Hindsight tells me that he may have fed in those beans, but once he was crossed by Scabby, he moved on. Either way he was 5.5 years old and had to be around somewhere. I decided to move my cameras around a bit at the end of summer into places they hadn't been. I bought a new Bushnell Trophy Cam HD and set it up NW of Pete's where they had dozed the willows and we had picked up a few sheds that spring. I put it up on the 4th of October and by the 7th, I had Splitbrow on film. He only came by once, but he took his sweet time, so I got plenty of videos.

I had really hoped him to make a jump to a 135-140 deer, but he actually shrunk up a little. He kept the same mass and lost a little tine length. Thinking he would come back up and work the scrape by the cabin, I moved my camera up there on the 26th of October and caught him redhanded on the 28th.

We also picked him up on the same logging road the next day on the 29th.

Again trying to move my cameras around a bit I brought one down to my stand SE of the landing where I shot at Tank and killed Crazy 8. I hung that camera on the afternoon of the 5th and got him there on the evening of the sixth. My friend Zach got him on camera the day before. So we know he's in the immediate area.

On Thursday the 10th of November, dad had an encounter with Pencil and let him go. The next day, Friday the 11th, dad had another buck come towards the ladder stand and after he counted 10 points he shot. It was the two year old 10. Steph and I were on our way to GF when dad text me a picture of his dead buck and asked me which one it was. I was a little upset. Later that afternoon/evening as we were sitting down for supper at Whitey's restaurant in EGF I got another text that said Splitbrow was dead!

Sure enough Mom shot him! Apparently a doe came out on the strip near the south end of the shack field and dad saw it first. Mom eventually saw it and soon after a buck came behind her. Light was starting to fade quickly and she made up her mind to shoot. After fumbling with her safety a bit, she made a great shot and he only made it 50 yards. Neither mom nor dad realized it was Splitbrow when she shot. What a trophy for mom.  A five and half year old buck. Finally. We got lots of pictures eventually and both mom and dad were fit to be tied.

Dad did a european mount for mom and it looks beautiful.
Splitbrow was a classic story. He was most likely a wanderer until he established some type of dominance at 4.5 and then his core area was defined by the older more dominant bucks around him. I wonder what kept him from going north or west of where he was. To the south was Scabby. To the west is probably Bullwinkle. Where's Mr. 140? North? Our neighbor picked up Splitbrow's matching set as a 3.5 year old and his left single as a 4.5 year old. Pretty great history.

A Tribute To The Fallen - Scabby 9

The story of Scabby 9 began at two different times: November 21st @ 7:30 in the morning, 2009 was the first sighting of an unidentified buck (or so we thought) cruising a logging road on the the downswing of the rut. However, the first actual sighting that I figured out later was that same spring, back in April or May at the cedar stump NW of the landing. A deer appeared several times that spring that had a huge tear in his left ear and I thought to myself, "That deer won't be hard to identify.

Unfortunately, in the photo on November 21st, his ear was tucked back behind his main beam. So you cant really see it. In this same November photo, the buck was bleeding out of a wound in the side of his head likely from a good battle the week before. This is where the name came from - Scabby 8. It was really hard to estimate this deer as he had good main beams, shorter G2s and pretty good mass. At first I thought he was 4 if not 5 from that initial photo. After looking back to the spring pictures, I thought he could be as young as 3. Our only other photos of this buck were from John's farmyard when there was soybeans spilled everywhere. Oddly enough, even with a good food source, he only came by the camera a few times in a month and a half - telling me his core area was a little ways from there.

Dad picked up the left side of Scabby 8 in March of 2010 - up in the cedars NW of the bus.

In the late summer of 2010, I finally picked up on Scabby 8 in an island woods we call the Tweeten woods. It was the end of August and it was final that Scabby 8 was going to be Scabby 10 as he grew double crab claws off the ends of his beams.

It was quite a while after those velvet pictures until we got our next photo. Sure enough the next photo was right back where we got our very first photo of him the year before - the logging road. It was October 24th about an hour and a half after dark.

It wasn't the best picture, but it showed us what direction he was coming from and where he was headed - he was traveling west to east. That coincided with the picture from the year before where he was heading east to west in the morning. So his core area was west of that camera.
Eventually, after rifle season, I moved some cameras around to try to locate this big deer. I set a few cameras north of the road between Pete's and John's and one on the east side of John's farmyard. It wasn't long before I nailed him.

That was his entrance and exit (at least post-rut) into the soybean stubble. He really filled out and  by that point I was leaning towards him being a 5 year old.

I got several pictures that season of half-bodies (typical of cold weather trail cameras) and I began to recognize the shape of his body.

He still wasn't very tall and although he had increased his mass and spread, he would probably have grossed in the mid 130s. The same neighbor whose wife shot him in 2011, picked his left antler up in the spring of 2011.

Hoping he could have one more good year of growth, I set out to find him in 2011. It didn't take long to confirm he survived the winter. I picked him up NW of the landing at the same cedar stump where I had the first pictures of him with his torn ear. He came in once or twice in the third week of may.

I didn't see him again until the end of July when I moved my camera back out to the Tweeten woods. I had a yearling, a two year old, The Wide Heavy 8, and Scabby 10 (which looked to be becoming a 9).

I was excited to watch these bucks grow. The summer before (2010), I had several different bucks frequenting this mineral site. This year, after Scabby moved in, the rest (besided the yearling) never came back. It reminds me of Scott Prucha's story of Cheech. This was a dominant buck by 2011 (probably a 6 year old) and he apparently didn't take long to let the others know that. After the 1st of August these other bucks were gone.

I set up a new camera site west of the Tweeten woods over by John's pond - almost a mile west. I picked up on Scabby 9 there two different times in later August.

So my guess was that he was living somewhere between Heller's willows and Rice's Thicket. I even called it - I said, "Someone will get a chance at him if they hunt that Thicket on Rice's. And sure enough, on Friday morning, November 11th, he bolted out of the Thicket with hot doe and that was the end of him. He was gunned down by a neighbor's wife.
Scabby 9 did not gain anything from 5 to 6 years old. Considering our harsh winter, he stayed about the same, but since he lost a G4 on his left side, he lost about 5 or 6 inches to his gross score. He probably grossed  130 or so. I'll confirm this eventually. This buck was interesting to follow. We learn a lot of lessons watching a buck reach maturity: how their range changes, a particular buck's personality, aggression, and shedding timing. In 2009/2010, Scabby held his antlers until the very end of January. In 2010/2011, he dropped them between December 10th and January 7th. So the deep snow and stress definitely made him drop early. It would be nice to get all the details of the morning of the kill. It's not often we get to observe a mature buck in the wild - during the rut.