Kansas hunter Dallas Birk knew he was chasing a special deer three seasons ago when he first became aware of the big nontypical. When he finally caught up with the buck this October, he put his tag on one of the highest-scoring whitetails of the 2024 season. Birk’s giant carried 31 scorable points and, when scored by Buckmasters measurer Brad Forbus, it tallied a BTR total of 255 inches. “When I first walked up to him, I was absolutely speechless,” Birk told F&S. “Not only was he huge, but I had a lot of history with that buck. It was a pretty amazing journey.”
Birk got his first trail-cam pics of the gnarly-racked buck in 2022. “He was a main-frame 10 with stickers on his G2s and stickers off his brow tines,” he said. “He had 15 points total, but I could tell from the body and the face he was a fairly young deer. I was hoping he would make it, and my sister actually had him at 100 yards during the rifle season that year. But she was shooting a 30-30 lever-action and felt it was too far and passed the shot. I thanked her for that.”
Related: The Biggest Bucks of 2024
In the fall of 2023, Birk figured out that the buck had relocated to a farm a mile away, but one he had permission to hunt. “I thought he was a 200-inch deer that season, and he was just very visible, wandering pretty widely and often in daylight,” Birk said. “So a lot of people knew about him and of course were hunting him. Fortunately, he went pretty nocturnal about the time rifle season came in, so he made it through another year." Come spring, Birk looked hard for the buck's sheds but never found either side. "Finally, I asked a neighbor who also shed-hunted if he'd had any luck—and he had the matched set. Giving the buck an 18-inch spread, I came up with 209 gross."
As the 2024 Kansas archery season approached, Birk was having trouble getting on the buck. Although he’d located the big nonytp in mid-summer, the deer vanished for months afterward. “Finally on September 29, I got a photo of him, and on the morning of October 6, he appeared again only 20 minutes before daylight,” he recalled. “He was definitely a morning deer, at least on the farm where I could hunt. There are no trees on this part of the property, so I put up a blind, then brushed and grassed it in so it wouldn’t stick out too badly." Birk hunted the blind for a few days but never laid eyes on the buck. So, he went back through ever trail-cam photo he had of the deer, looking for patterns. "I noticed he’d daylighted on October 17 two years in a row. So I went out that day and didn’t see him. But the next morning everything changed.”
On October 18, Birk was in his ground blind watching a group of does when he looked up and saw the big nontypical's rack coming his way. “Then buck fever set in,” Birk said. The monster milled near a mineral block for a while but offered Birk no ethical shot, though he was at full draw for many minutes, waiting for the buck to turn. Finally the exhausted hunter let down and had time enough to gather some strength when the buck walked to a mock scrape and gave him a solid broadside shot. Birk came to full draw again. “I waited until his leg was fully extended forward as he worked the scrape, then I took my shot,” he recalled. “I got a full pass through, and the buck ran off about 100 yards, back toward his bedding area, and disappeared. I recovered my arrow and called a buddy to come help me track.”
Birk had good blood on his arrow but also some stomach matter, so he decided to give the buck until noon before tracking. The pair followed a solid blood trail into a watershed area and could tell by the spoor that the buck had been jumped by coyotes. Not long after that, the blood trail seemed to dry up, so Birk called in some friends with tracking dogs to help. “They couldn't get there until about 5:00 pm, and they started working one area and I went to another,” Birk said. “Finally they called me to tell me they had my buck; he had doubled back on his trail, fighting coyotes the whole way. He had coyote fur on his antlers and died about 30 yards from where I found first blood.”
Birk hustled to where the trackers were waiting. Unfortunately, the coyotes had had their fill, and Birk was disappointed to lose much of the meat. But he was relieved to recover the buck and a little stunned to be standing over the giant whitetail he'd been chasing for so long. “Finally one of the trackers said. ‘Well, are you gonna put your hands on him?’ and that snapped me out of it,” he said. “Everything just hit me; all the pics, trying to keep up with him, hunting for his sheds, figuring out the blind setup, it all came together. We honestly sat there for three hours just talking about deer, and it was one of the best times of my life.”
The 31-point monster sported 26-inch main beams, brow tines of 8 and 7 inches, and G2s over 14 inches each. As noted, Birk’s southeast Kansas giant notched 255 on the BTR system, and he plans to have the buck scored by a B&C measurer soon.
Read Next: 14-Year-Old Hunter Bags 240-Inch, 26-Point Buck While Still Hunting on Public Land in Ohio
