Shirley sleeps late, but arrives in time to take down nice 14-point
Apparently, the early bird doesn’t always get the worm.
Dennis Shirley slept a little late on Nov. 9, but still managed to get to his stand in time to shoot a non-typical 14-pointer in Red River Parish that green scored 165 inches Boone and Crockett.
“I had set my alarm, but I just hit the snooze button too many times,” he said with a laugh.
The evening before, the 31-year-old from Shreveport shot a 150-pound boar from that same box stand positioned on a pipeline, and had intended to switch locations for his Saturday morning hunt.
“I got up a little bit late, and I was headed to another stand,” Shirley said. “But I pulled in, and my brother’s truck was already there, so I had to leave that stand and go back to the stand where I hunted the evening before and killed the pig.
“I didn’t even need a flashlight walking in there. It was probably 6:10 or 6:15. I climbed up in the stand not expecting to see anything.”
He decided to grunt a few times, and less than ten minutes later, the big buck was on his way.
“I could hear him coming through the brush,” Shirley said. “He wasn’t walking on a trail or anything. He was coming straight through the middle of the thicket.”
The 14-pointer stopped behind a big bush, and finally presented himself about 110 yards away.
“I could see the split G2s, and when he stepped out on that pipeline, I didn’t give him a chance to run across,” he said.
Shirley’s Remington 7 mag found its mark, and the deer took off and crossed the pipeline.
“I knew I made a good shot, and I got down and I found meat and hair and a little bit of blood,” he said.
He called his brother Michael to help him find the buck, and with the help of a dog, they located him a few hours later about 70 yards from where he’d been shot.
The big buck’s impressive rack, a mainframe 8-point, featured a split G2 on the left side, and a right G2 with three points. The inside spread was 19 1/2 inches, with 5 1/2 inches of mass between the G2 and G3 on each side. He weighed 225 pounds, and green scored 165 inches Boone and Crockett.
Shirley had seen the big buck on his trail cameras a month before the season started, and might have possibly seen him in 2012, as well.
“I think I saw him last year when he was a mainframe 8-point. He was just a real heavy-horned deer last year,” he said. “This year he came back as a non-typical deer. We get that a lot over there where we hunt.”
Shirley, who shot a non-typical 20-pointer that scored 195 inches from the same stand four years ago, was just happy the late start allowed him and the buck to meet up.
“He’s a real good deer. I was tickled to death,” he said. “It was meant to be, I guess.”
Don’t forget to enter photos of your bucks in the Nikon Big Buck Photo Contest to be eligible for monthly giveaways and the random drawing for Nikon Monarch binoculars at the end of the contest.
Read other stories about big bucks killed this season by clicking here.
