‘Ol’ Janky Head’ ends 13-year drought for Evans
On Sunday, Dec. 1, Sidney Evans finally ended his 13-year buck drought in style with a great non-typical 18-point in Natchitoches Parish.
The 48-year-old forester from Natchitoches had certainly seen plenty of big deer over those 13 years, but he spent lots of quality time in the stand helping his three daughters, Courtney, 22, Laura Leigh, 19 and Anne, 15, learn the ropes and take down some big bucks themselves.
The girls are all active hunters now, and Anne started hunting by herself last year, freeing him up to get back in the swing and once again take down a buck of his own.
“Since it had been 13 years since I had shot one, my daughters had been harassing me,” Evans said with a laugh. “I was letting a lot of things walk, and I told my daughter, ‘It was because I had you sitting in my lap.’
“Well, I got one point for at least each year I missed.”
Ol’ Janky Head was named by Courtney’s boyfriend, Daniel Sprunk, who enjoys reading about nicknames given to bucks across the state in Louisiana Sportsman magazine and on LouisianaSportsman.com.
“Everybody’s always naming their deer, so I decided to start naming a few out there,” said Sprunk, 22, of Baton Rouge. “Janky was just a word that came to mind. It was just the first thing that popped into my head when I saw him on the trail cam.
“I was like, ‘Man, look at that rack. It’s all janked up.’ So I called him Ol’ Janky Head.”
The 230-pound buck had never been spotted during the day, but consistently appeared on the trail cam at the feeder where Evans eventually took him down, Sprunk said.
Evans got to his tripod positioned on the edge of a pipeline about daybreak that morning and hadn’t seen much at all in chilly, overcast conditions, until a hog appeared.
He was overlooking a food plot in the woods perpendicular to the pipeline, with a feeder about 125 yards away.
“I saw a hog cross the pipeline about 200 yards down and then had a doe come out at the feeder, and I just knew that hog was coming around to the feeder fixing to run that doe off, and my fun was going to be over,” Evans said.
But shortly thereafter, he heard a grunt in the thicket. The doe walked off, and Ol’ Janky Head appeared on the food plot and headed to the feeder about 7:45 a.m.
“He was going for the doe, he wasn’t necessarily coming for the corn. But he stopped to get a snack,” Evans said. “I was like, ‘There’s Ol’ Janky Head.’ Daniel had just told me his name the night before.”
He sighted him in with his .300 magnum, the big buck dropped on the spot, and his daughters started sending messages to his phone.
“They started texting me, ‘What did you get?’ What did you get?’” he said. “It was exciting. They didn’t want me to touch it. They wanted me to come pick them up before I ever picked it up.”
Ol’ Janky Head hasn’t been green scored yet, but his inside spread was 19 inches, with 4 ½-inch bases on each side and fist-sized mass just beyond each brow tine where the remaining antlers originate.
Sprunk said Evans definitely deserved to take down the big buck after waiting so long to even take a shot.
“Every time he sees a shooter, he lets it walk and on the next hunt he puts of his daughters on it and let’s them go kill it,” Sprunk said. “He’s been watching deer forever. The last one he killed 13 years ago was like a 160- to 170-class 10-point.
“So he’s been very patient,” Sprunk said. “A nice father to let his daughters kill all those trophies and put them up on the wall.”
Ol’ Janky Head was the final deer taken in a successful five-day Thanksgiving holiday hunt on the family’s lease in Natchitoches Parish near the Red River, which included two does and a nice 9-point taken by Laura Leigh.
So Ol’ Janky Head was one more deer Evans had to clean.
“After cleaning three already, I really wasn’t excited about killing another one,” he said with a smile. “But it had to be done, because my daughters were rooting for me.”
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.
