Spook Spann Buck

Story:

Ohio Buck a Gershwin Song

By: Mike Handley (Originally Published on buckmasters.com)

     While just as impressive, do not confuse the monstrous deer Spook Spann arrowed this past season with the one that made headlines nine years ago. The celebrity hunter from Tennessee is going to keep this one.

     When Spook skewered a 230-plus-inch Kansas whitetail on film in 2007, his soon became a household name among deer hunters. And it still is, even though the deer later became the center of a controversy.

     According to Duncan Dobie, author of numerous hunting books and a frequent contributor to Rack magazine, Spook has always maintained he unknowingly purchased the wrong deer tag, which resulted in his paying a fine and forfeiting the deer that helped propel his career.

     Prior to the 2007 season, Spook had always obtained transferable landowner tags from his outfitter. But the rules changed that year.

     Because those tags were no longer transferable, he wound up purchasing his own over-the-counter landowner tag under the (faulty) rationalization that the property he planned to hunt was under contract to purchase; leased until the sale was complete.

     In Nov. 2012, Spook was charged with violating the federal Lacey Act for illegally transporting game across state lines (taking his trophy buck from Kansas to his home in Tennessee).

     That was then.

     His most recent giant buck came out of Ohio, where all licenses are sold over the counter. Ohio is one of the very few states that routinely yields the kind of deer Kansas grows.

     Spook and his “Spook Nation” cameraman, Jason Dotson (J.D.), first retrieved trail camera photos of the Ohio giant in 2014. He named it Whiplash because of the way he jerked his head back to look at the deer sandwiched among hundreds of images.

     It had packed on another 50 inches by the time men and buck breathed the same air on Nov. 7, 2015.

     “Before we climbed up to our stands, I made a mock scrape in the dark under our tree and hung a holly branch over it. I put deer lure in the scrape and on the limb,” Spook told Duncan.

     “Whiplash came in 30 minutes after daylight, grunting with his nose to the ground,” he added.

     The buck eventually faded back into the timber, on the heels of a doe that passed through earlier.

     Several young bucks and maybe the same doe visited Spook’s mock scrape that afternoon.

“We watched a small buck going crazy in the scrape for about two minutes, and then I looked up and saw Whiplash facing me from about 35 to 40 yards,” Spook said. “He was watching the smaller buck.”

     When yet another buck arrived and paid more attention to the doe than to the scrape, Whiplash came in for the fight.

     The 30-pointer has a BTR composite score of 257 2/8 inches.