Brothers team up to get bigger deer

Oct 28, 2008 (Tulsa World - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- HMC | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- DEER TALES are plentiful this week, and I have a few that are really worth sharing. We'll start with the smaller ones today and work up to the big ones on Thursday.

Not that anyone would use the term "small" for the 150-inch class bucks that Art Brown and his brother, David, took earlier this month on Art's 1,040-acre ranch north of Tahlequah.

Art, a member of the Matthews Archery Pro Staff, shoots in 3-D archery tournaments across the country, but when he's at home he practices what he's learned to help the deer around his property. This season he practiced some good sportsmanship, solid ethics, and was a good brother to boot.

Art had a nice buck that would score 150-plus standing broadside to him at 20 yards, twice, earlier this season but he let it walk. His brother took the bigger buck 12 days later.

Why? Because Brown wanted to take another buck, a slightly smaller one. Brown had watched that buck grow for 5 1/2 years. He passed it up last season and convinced his neighbors to do the same. He later found sheds that would have scored about 162. But he also got photos of the deer on a trail camera later in the season. It had been hit in the back leg and foot by a rifle hunter.

"That deer

and I had a lot of history and I didn't want to see him suffer any longer," he said.

That history included much of the work Brown has done on his ranch in the seven years he's owned it. He's planted food plots where he can on the rocky terrain. Each spring he does some supplemental feeding with protein pellets. He puts out some mineral lick blocks, does brush clearing to keep natural browse plentiful, works with hunters to take a number of doe each year to keep the population ratio healthy, and he and his neighbors work together to pass up a lot of smaller bucks.

"It's that old theory. You can't shoot 150, 160, 170 deer if you're always shooting 130s," he said.

He has noticed deer leap into those larger categories after the age of about 3 1/2. "Generally about 3 1/2 to 5 1/2 is prime antler time," he said.

Art and David -- who comes down from Denver to hunt annually -- were rewarded with two nice bucks for those past efforts. Not that doing the right thing is always easy, especially when you're passing up a nice buck for your brother. "I was passing it up telling myself, 'I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot,' he said.

But it worked out. On Oct. 8 he connected with his older deer. He said it scored 153 gross. "He was still a great, beautiful deer, but it was sad to see him go backwards." And on Oct. 20 his brother took that other big deer, which grossed 155, as Brown teamed with him to film the hunt.

A respectable pair -- of deer and of brothers.

Fundraiser success: I have to thank Dennis Barnes, who was kind, or crazy, enough to take me up on a line I inserted as a joke in a recent column about a charity bass tournament his sister helped organize as a fundraiser for the Eastland Assembly of God Church School for special needs students. Yes, he took me out as his partner in the bass tournament.

I had a great time on my first stint as back-of-the-boat angler not contributing a single fish to the five-fish limit that Barnes and I carried to the final weigh-in at Grand Lake on Saturday. I did land a couple of bass, they just weren't keepers. Let's just say it's a good thing I only have to write about fishing to earn a living.

Big thanks, Dennis, for putting up with an under-equipped partner for a day, and congratulations to the Tulsa Bass Anglers, Honda and a mess of other sponsors who teamed up to raise over $11,000 for the school on Saturday.

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