I got a call a couple weeks ago around 8:30am from a friend of mine. He was coming from El Campo and going towards Wharton. He told me that there was a "Big" buck dead on the side of the road. This guy is not a deer guy, so I was not giving it a lot of thought. Then he said that the horns were sticking up over the grass. I jumped in the car and hauled it over to Pierce. This deer was dead on Hwy 59 about 50 yards past the Pierce Texas exit when coming from El Campo. There was already a herd of trucks piled up around it. The deer had been dead for several hours and was just starting to swell. The antlers had suffered almost no ill effects from the collision. The buck was huge. The bases on this thing were around 6". The tines were not particularly long, but the buck had 13points and mass all the way out. The inside spread was right at 18". I called the game warden, and told him we were going to have a wreck on 59 if I did not remove it. He said he was on his way. I cut the head off, and some employees from the Precinct Barn brought a backhoe over to dispose of the carcass. The county workers said they had been watching this buck for a couple days run does across the road from the DPS office. I estimated the buck to go in the 150's. Scott Blackburn the game warden showed up, and he called the TPWD Biologist who then arrived. The deer was aged at 3.5yoa. When I cut the head off I noticed that there was an ear tag hole in his right ear. The biologist told us to check the other ear for a tattoo. Sure enough there was a tat in the left ear. He said that there was a high fence operation about 5 miles south of Pierce called Blue Creek Whitetails. I went with the Game Warden to that location and met with the ranch manager. He pulled out his paperwork and sure enough he had records on this deer. 3.5yo and a gross score of 161 2/8ths B&C. According to the manager this buck was a stocker buck that had not been sold, so it was released into thier 8000 acre high fence hunting preserve 3 weeks ago. They have an automatic gate that works on solar power and apparently had malfunctioned causing the gate to not close properly. They suspected the deer had escaped through the gate, although it could have simply jumped the 8' high fence if it really wanted to. The amazing this was that this buck and several other stocker bucks had been released almost 6 miles into the property. This put the distance from where the buck was released to where it was killed at approximately 11 miles. The head is going to be skull mounted and retained by Parks and Wildlife. These photos really don't do this deer justice. It was really neat to see the scientific breeder operation at Blue Creek Whitetails. They were actually working some deer when we got there and we got to watch then vaccinate about 20 does. If only I had gotten a degree in deer biology. What a job that would be.
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