Pennsylvania is home to roughly 1,400 elk that roam 3,000 square miles in the states north-central region. This year, the Pennsylvania Game Commission awarded 140 tags after receiving more than 50,000 applications. One of the those lucky hunters was Mike Skvarla, who walked away with would should be the next state-record bull after an exciting early-morning archery hunt.
Skvarla shot the enormous bull with a crossbow during a guided hunt on private property, he tells Field & Stream. A Pennsylvania resident who works as an entomologist at Penn State University, he’s been putting in for the tag since 2019. But he’d never been on an elk hunt until this year. “I was fishing in Indiana when they called and said I’d drawn the tag,” he says. “I was in complete shock. I thought someone was messing with me.”
On the morning of Tuesday, September 15, Skvarla drove 45 minutes from his home to Unit 307. “We went in sight unseen,” he recalls. “None of my guides had ever seen this property before. But I trusted that they knew what they were doing, and it turns out they did.”
Skvarla and his guides—from Trophy Rack Lodge in nearby Karthaus—hiked in by moonlight and found a place to set up in the dark. “The caller calls and immediately there are three or four bulls bugling right around us,” he recalls. “He called a few more times, and one of them started moving in closer.”
After calling back and forth with the bull for 15 minutes, the guide moved up to Skvarla’s position and told him it was coming in from behind. “By now, it was getting light, and we repositioned ourselves behind two scraggly pine trees,” he says. “I had two or three narrow shooting lanes out in front of me.”
Skvarla could hear the big bull moving closer. “All of the sudden, my guide says he can see the antlers,” he says. “But I still couldn’t see anything.”
When the bull got to within 60 yards, it stopped and bugled again. Skvarla could see its giant body through the thick cover. “I didn’t really look at the rack,” he says. “I could tell it was big, but I just wanted to get the crossbow in place and get ready for the shot.”
He says he felt a rush of adrenaline when the bull first appeared. But then his focus narrowed. “I was as calm as I could be. No rising heart rate, no nothing, just focused,” he says. “When he stepped up to 42 yards, I put my pin on him and pulled the trigger. It was as good a shot as you could ask for.”
The bull ran 20 yards and fell down, he says. But then it got up and ran another 20 before falling again. “That happened two or three more times before he eventually ran out of sight,” says Skvarla, who studies deer keds and ticks at Penn State. “We gave him 30 minutes and then started blood trailing him. We’d leave one person on whatever speck of blood we could find and then push on ahead because we didn’t want to lose the blood trail.”
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Skvarla’s bull was one for the record books. It sported an 8X8 typical frame with a 41-inch inside spread and main beams measuring 49 and 54 inches. It green grossed 428 inches with an estimated net score of about 395. If that holds without too much natural shrinkage, the bull is poised to break both the standing Pennsylvania archery record (407 4/8) and the firearms record (415 2/8 inches). It was 9-and-a-half years old.
