As South Florida bowhunters prepare for a new season, it’s good to know that bagging the buck of your dreams is not impossible. Even in Florida.
Thanks to hard work, smart scouting and a little luck, James Stovall shot a white-tailed deer with antlers so tremendous, people do a double-take when he tells them he got it not far from his home in Lakeland.
On Sept. 25, 1999, Stovall killed a deer with a 25-point non-typical rack that scored 2036/8 BTR (Buckmaster Whitetail Trophy Record) points and 206 Boone & Crockett points, making it the Florida non-typical record.
Stovall got his buck during a special opportunity hunt at the Green Swamp West Wildlife Management Area. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission offers the hunts on new properties with good populations of deer, hogs and turkeys.
There is a $5 fee to apply for the hunts — you can apply as often as you like — and if you are selected, you must pay $50 to $100 for the permit. For that money, you get to hunt prime property with a handful of other hunters.
The 38,000-acre Green Swamp West WMA had been closed to deer hunting for 13 years when the FWC offered the hunt. Stovall scouted the area last spring and liked what he saw.
“I was impressed by the amount of rubs and the size of the rubs,” said Stovall, referring to the marks left by bucks when they rub their antlers on the trunk of a small tree. “They were still pretty fresh from the previous season, and they ranged from saplings to trees the size of my calf.”
Stovall, 31, started going to the woods with his grandfather when he was 5 and started bowhunting in 1982, when he was 13. He works for Lakeland Electric, hooking up power for new customers and cutting off power for those who don’t pay their bills. He likes to hunt on public areas that don’t receive much pressure, which is why he put in 14 applications, at a cost of $70, for one of 54 permits offered for each of two archery hunts at Green Swamp West. Stovall got lucky, receiving permits for both hunts, then got serious about scouting.
He obtained topographic maps of the land and picked the brains of wildlife biologists and hunters familiar with the area.
“Anybody who might know anything about it, I was questioning them,” Stovall said. “They were giving me information, and I was just plugging it in.”
Stovall learned what types of food were in the area, how big the bucks grew and where the deer were concentrated. He made about 15 preseason trips into the area, riding in on his bicycle and spending anywhere from a couple of hours to an entire day looking for signs of deer and watching deer from his portable treestand.
He had narrowed down his choice of spots to a handful, including a natural funnel that the deer used to travel between two large ponds. On the morning of Sept. 20, Stovall was following several large deer tracks when he saw a buck with about 200 inches of antler. He had seen several bucks with 100-115 inches, but this one took his breath away.
“I looked up and there he was, about 40 yards away, standing and feeding with no idea I was there,” Stovall said. “The most points I could count was 17 because he was moving his head. I knew that’s the deer I wanted to hunt. I was just in awe. I remember saying to myself, ‘I knew there were monster deer out here, but I didn’t ever think I’d see one like him.’
“I watched for a few minutes and then he got uneasy and eased off. I went back and got my treestand and went to hang it, but he was right back in there with three other bucks — a 10-pointer and two 8s. They saw me and ran out of there.”
Although Stovall was excited, he also was concerned the bucks now knew they were being hunted.
Stovall put up his treestand and didn’t come back until the first morning of the hunt. He arrived at the check station at 4 a.m., an hour before it opened, so he would be the first hunter on the property.
He was on his stand before 6 and remained there for almost 13 hours, sitting out an afternoon storm. All Stovall had seen were three deer that walked under his stand while it was still dark and a doe that came out at 11:30 a.m.
Suddenly, at 6:10 p.m., the big buck appeared about 150 yards from the stand.
“He was just milling around, feeding, and he had an 8-pointer with him,” Stovall said. “The 8-point committed to stepping out, and he fed across while the big buck stayed in the thicker stuff. Finally, my buck started easing out and he kept looking at that 8-pointer.
“I knew he was going to follow the same path as that 8-pointer. I got down from the stand around 6:45 and crawled 150 yards in a semicircle to get ahead of his travel path.”
Stovall got within 60 yards of the trail — he didn’t dare go any farther because of the sparse cover — stood up, nocked an arrow and watched as the deer continued to feed. When the deer came within 53 yards, Stovall shot and dropped the buck in his tracks.
“I shoot year-round out to 70 yards, so I had confidence that I could make the shot,” Stovall said. “I shoot my bow four days a week. I have a target in my garage, and my neighbor across the street lets me shoot from his yard. I just tell my wife to stay out of the living room in case I miss the target.”
The 31/2-year-old deer weighed 150 pounds. Soon after, Stovall contacted Buckmasters, the Montgomery, Ala.-based conservation organization that has more than 300,000 deer-hunting members.
Stovall’s buck ended up being honored by Buckmasters with the Golden Laurel Citation as the most outstanding entry in the BTR record book for 1999.
“A lot of people think it means the biggest deer,” said Russell Thornberry, the editor-in-chief of all Buckmaster publications and the creator of the BTR scoring system, which awards points for every inch of antler.
“If a non-typical deer breaks a record, and it often happens in two or three states a year, we choose the buck that breaks a record by the greatest percentage. His buck beat it by 100 percent because there was nothing for Florida non-typicals in our book. What makes it even more impressive is it was from a state that doesn’t have a reputation for producing big deer.”
Can Stovall’s buck ever be topped? Stay tuned. Stovall has a Green Swamp West archery hunt permit — he applied 50 times — for this season and said he knows where another big buck hangs out.
You can hear Steve Waters on Newsradio 610 every Saturday at 6:21 and 8:21 a.m.
