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.