Mike Ferriman, a 42-year-old agricultural sales rep from Caledonia, Ohio first learned of a giant buck this year on a farm he has permission to hunt on September 22. A few trail camera photos revealed that the massive whitetail’s rack was similar to a heavy buck he had photos of last year on the same farm.
“But this year his rack had just blown up,” Ferriman tells Outdoor Life. “There were some familiar kicker points to the rack, but it was a lot bigger and heavier.”
Ferriman didn’t have many trail cam pictures of the deer before he got into a 21-foot-high ladder stand on the farm in heavy timber the afternoon of October 20.
“I had a mineral site set up in the woods 30 yards from my ladder stand, with a couple trail cameras nearby,” says Ferriman. “The big buck came through the area the night of Oct. 18, and I got one photo of him, and he was gone.
“The next night on Oct. 19 he came to the mineral site at 6 p.m., and he hung around awhile. The buck checked the same mineral spot three times that night, so I knew I had to hunt the stand the next evening provided I had a good northeast wind.”
Fortunately, the wind was perfect, and the crossbow hunter walked to his stand that following afternoon.
“I bumped a couple does walking 300 yards to the stand, but the place is full of deer and no matter how or when I go in I move some deer,” he says. “I got up in my stand, and pretty soon I was surrounded by about a dozen does.
“They were very close, and I’m convinced they didn’t catch my scent because of the Ozonics scent control I was using. It was 70 degrees and I was sweating a lot. But no deer scented me.”
That evening was only the second time Ferriman had hunted the spot, and he knew another heavy buck was in the vicinity, too.
“I had two big bucks in the area – I’m just glad the biggest one showed up first, so I didn’t have to decide whether to take the smaller one, which was still a giant deer,” he says.
With does everywhere around his ladder stand, Ferriman noticed movement on a trail and quickly realized the huge non-typical buck was headed toward his mineral site.
“He came straight in toward me from 90 yards away where I first spotted him,” he says. “I almost took a shot at him at 50 yards, but he kept coming and a closer shot was what I wanted.
“He went behind a downed tree and some brush and just stood there. Then he stepped out, head down, but was facing me. I thought about a neck shot when he looked up. But just then a doe behind me made a noise, and he turned quartering away, and I took my shot at 30 yards.”
Using a Ravin crossbow, his Rage Hypodermic 2-blade, 100-grain arrow penetrated completely through the buck.
“I heard a loud thud from the arrow hitting and watched him run – and almost in slow motion – he went 50 yards and fell,” Ferriman recalls. “I was in disbelief and couldn’t comprehend how fast he’d piled up.”
Ferriman used binoculars to check the downed buck, and confirmed the giant deer was down for good.
He sent out text messages to his wife Holly and some friends alerting them of his success, and requesting help to get the deer out.
Shortly, Holly and his pals arrived and used a drag sled to get the huge buck out of the woods and into a truck. They went to a friend’s house, where they had a scale that could weigh the massive deer.
Ferriman says the deer weighed 290 pounds, not field dressed.
He took the buck to Toby Hughes, a Buckmasters official scorer in Ohio, who measured the rack’s 28 scorable points at 250 3/8s inches.
The deer is estimated at 5.5 to 6.5 years old, and its teeth will be officially aged, just as Ferriman does with all his bucks.
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Ferriman is a schooled taxidermist and will have the deer mounted, perhaps even a full-body mount.
“I’ve shot some great deer, some up to 150-inches,” he says. “But this buck is far and away the best I’ve ever taken.”