530 Inch Trifecta

by Gordy Kran

When he purchased 160 acres of prime deer habitat in his home state of Kansas, Billy O’Connor’s goal was to kill a Booner during the first five years of ownership. A lofty goal, yes, but the Sunflower State hunter couldn’t have even imagined the enormity of what would occur during the final season of that countdown.

Like so many rural Midwestern lads, the 45-year old O’Connor, who works for Whitetail Properties Real Estate, a company that sells prime hunting land in 38 states, grew up pursuing whitetails. His property sits adjacent to the family’s roughly 700 agricultural acres in the eastern part of the state. Agricultural practices take priority on the family land, but O’Connor’s 160 acres were set aside exclusively for hunting.

Kansas has long been a destination for whitetail aficionados — a big-buck mecca for discriminate hunters — and rightfully so. Deer numbers and buck quality have increased dramatically during the past two or three decades — the culmination of good genetics, plentiful food and sound management — and whitetails can be found throughout the state where suitable habitat exists. The highest population densities occur in the eastern third of the state, where whitetails have adapted well to Kansas’ contemporary landscape, taking cover in natural woodlands, shelterbelts, and old homesteads and grasslands, and finding abundant food in adjacent agricultural croplands — and hunters’ food plots.

“Let me put it this way, the deer aren’t starving in Kansas, at least not where I’m at,” O’Connor said. “There are agriculture fields all over, and during the early season, there’s a lot of natural browse for them to feed on. And then there’s the food plots. We started out planting ours with local seed I got from my cousin — wheat, clover, turnips, chicory and such — and it was OK. But there are ag crops all over, and my thought process was that I wanted to give the deer a selection of feed they couldn’t get elsewhere. I know they’re going to leave my property, but I wanted to make sure they didn’t have any reason to leave.” And for the Kansas hunter, that meant taking his food plots to the next level.

Better Feed Equals More Deer 

When Whitetail Properties developed a business relationship with Whitetail Institute, O’Connor decided to try some of its products to bolster his food plot efforts.

“At that time, I had four food plots, the biggest one about an acre,” he said. “When I switched to Imperial Whitetail Clover in the larger plot and Whitetail Oats Plus in the others, deer numbers really picked up, and we were seeing more mature deer.”

Whitetail Oats Plus is a high-sugar, cold-tolerant forage oats that establishes quickly and holds deer on a property longer into winter. It includes small amounts of triticale to enhance winter hardiness. Genetically designed for white-tailed deer, Imperial Whitetail Clover packs extremely high protein content critical for antler, muscle and bone growth in bucks. Whitetail does use the much-needed nutrition to help deliver healthier fawns and produce more milk.

So when the 2018 season rolled around, the food plots were attracting deer like bees to honey, including a special buck O’Connor had been keeping an eye on for several years — a massive nontypical he tagged “Beamer.”

“Yeah, there was a significant difference once we started using the Whitetail Institute products,” he said. “It was nothing to see 25 or 30 deer during a sit. Beamer actually came in the first time I hunted over a Whitetail Oats Plus plot. Does were out there feeding, and they’d bring their heads up, and they looked like brontosauruses coming up out of the swamp, with oats hanging out of both sides of their mouths.” 

A Buck for the Record Books

O’Connor had been aware of the impressive buck since it was a youngster.

“My brother Patrick first saw him when he was hunting in 2014, when the buck was 1.5 or maybe 2.5 years old. Even at that young age, he had 12 small points. We started getting trail camera pictures of him, and we knew he had a lot of potential. Then the next year, he kind of blew up — like maybe 16 points, poking out everywhere. And we’re thinking he’s only 2.5 years old, but it’s just that he had all these points.”

O’Connor watched the buck grow, biding his time, and by 2017, Beamer had developed into an absolute giant.

“We guesstimated him to be about 190 gross inches because he now had lots of mass to go long with all of those points,” he said. “Every year, his shape kind of changed, but there were always similarities, and he had a cut in his ear, so he was easy to identify.”

But that year, Beamer broke off half of his rack, and O’Connor passed on him, hoping the big buck would make it through to the next season.

In 2018, O’Connor was hunting from a homemade tower blind overlooking the largest of their food plots, then planted in Imperial Whitetail Clover.

“Putting up this blind was kind of a family affair, (as it was) built from telephone poles and wood from an old barn my grandpa tore down,” he said. “It’s in the south-central part of the property, and on the western side is a big overgrown pasture full of plum thickets, dogwood and cedar. We put a lot of effort into building this thing, and it was initially designed to be a rifle stand. We didn’t think deer would come in to the plot because that stand stuck out like a sore thumb. Actually, we put the food plot around it just to have a firebreak. We planted it in Imperial Whitetail Clover the first year and noticed immediately deer were coming to the food plot. They didn’t even care there was this big, massive blind down there. And it’s just been that way ever since. You could have two guys and a dog up there in that stand, and they don’t seem to care.”

According to O’Connor, Beamer had dropped a bit in size that year, but he was more symmetrical.

“I’m not saying he was a pretty deer, but he was more balanced that year,” he said. “But I didn’t think he’d score as high as the previous year. But we’re thinking this deer is 6.5 years old now, and we have outfitters who have leased land on two sides of us. I was wishing he was a bit bigger, but we had to try to get him, and he had been frequenting the tower stand food plot.” 

The Battle with Beamer 

O’Connor was hunting with his crossbow, sitting in the tower blind with his dad, when Beamer showed up and walked right into range.

“I actually had him in range, but I let him go,” O’Connor said. “Then he turned around and walked away, and I’m looking at him through my bino, and I’m thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ I knew I had made a big mistake.”

The next evening, O’Connor hunted from the same stand with Patrick. “I had a pretty good idea Beamer was coming to the food plot from the overgrown pasture to our west, probably one of his bedding areas,” O’Connor said. “I was glassing and spotted his tines in the brush maybe a couple of hundred yards away.”

The buck crossed the food plot, walking straight toward the hunter.

“We were running out of shooting light as he worked his way across the food plot and into range,” O’Connor said. “He was coming straight at me, and I didn’t want to take the straight-on shot.”

Finally, the buck turned broadside at 40 yards, and the hunter took the shot. “I hit a little farther back than I wanted, but I felt good about the shot,” he said.

The buck made it 200 yards to the timber, and it was getting dark. So rather than risk bumping the deer, O’Connor and his brother made the difficult decision to leave it and come back in the morning.

“We came back the next morning and found that he had gone in about 100 yards, crossed the creek and died on the other side,” O’Connor said. The buck rough-scored an incredible 184 gross inches. But that’s not where the story ends.

More to the Tale

A week later, Patrick killed an incredible buck they called “Crazy Base” from the same stand using a crossbow. The buck unofficially green-scored 189 gross inches, with a 170-inch frame and another 19 inches of points growing out of the antler bases.

“So for Pat to get that deer, we were beside ourselves,” O’Connor said. “Holy cow, we had both shot the biggest deer of our lives off this farm during the same year and from the same stand.

“And while all this was going on, we started getting night pictures of a really old buck we named ‘Night Rider.’ He used to only hang out on our neighbor’s farm, but this year, he became a regular on our place. I attribute this happening due to the use of Whitetail Institute. My father hunted him with a bow the entire season but never saw him in the field. But he eventually shot him on the opening day of rifle season with his rifle at 20 yards out of one of our interior bow stands — an impressive 160-incher. It was the first time he’d seen the buck during the day.”

So three huge bucks came off O’Connor’s property in 2018 — a 530-inch trifecta. It was a season like no other.

“A lot of years, we don’t kill a single buck here, because we’re trying to let them get to a certain age,” he said. “But to kill three bucks all over 5 years old with a combined 530 inches of antler on a 160-acre tract in one year — it’s the thing whitetail dreams are made of.”