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Hank Osterkamp killed his first pronghorn on a visit to Idaho when he was 12 years previous. The hunter from southern California has chased loads of antelope since then, and when he headed to New Mexico for a visit with Pronghorn Guide Service final month, he and his information David Brown already had a goal buck in thoughts. With Brown pointing him in the precise course, Osterkamp was in a position to drop the almost 30-inch-wide pronghorn throughout the first quarter-hour of opening day.
The buck they nicknamed “Chopper” is a freak of nature (in a great way) by pronghorn requirements. As an alternative of pointing up and curving gracefully inward, its horns splay out horizontally (kind of just like the blades on a helicopter). The buck has an inside unfold of 29 and ¾ inches from tip to tip. With roughly 84 inches of antler in whole, Osterkamp says the non-typical buck was precisely what he was in search of.
“He was only a large in each sense of the phrase,” Osterkamp says. “An enormous tremendous freak, you already know. For some purpose I’ve all the time simply been in love with the freaks.”
Osterkamp says he’d hunted with Brown earlier than, who helped him kill his largest pronghorn to this point with a personal landowner tag again in 2017. When Osterkamp drew a public land tag within the central a part of New Mexico earlier this yr, he was already wanting ahead to looking with Brown once more.
He says Brown known as him up a number of weeks earlier than their hunt on Aug. 14 and informed him he’d already discovered a novel wanting buck on the chunk of public land they had been planning to hunt. He despatched Osterkamp a photograph of the buck and that was all he wanted to see.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my god, that factor’s wonderful,’” Osterkamp says, “and I informed David, ‘You may cease wanting proper now. I don’t even need to take into consideration one other one.’”
Since Brown had completed a lot of the legwork by the point Osterkamp arrived in central New Mexico, they knew precisely the place they had been headed on opening morning. The 2 had glassed the buck the night earlier than, and once they drove out to the identical space earlier than dawn, the buck hadn’t moved far. They might see Chopper’s blades from a mile away.
By quarter-hour after taking pictures mild, the 2 had slowly labored their solution to inside 250 yards or so of the buck. Osterkamp bought his Gunwerks 28 Nosler on the taking pictures sticks and squeezed off a shot. He spined the buck and it dropped in its tracks.
He and Brown rough-scored the buck within the mid-80’s, and Osterkamp says he’ll have a Boone and Crockett scorer have a look at the rack after the 60-day drying interval ends. “He may very well be a record-book buck whilst freaky as he’s,” Osterkamp provides.
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