Five-Year Hunt For Laurens County Buck Comes To End

For five years, a big Laurens County whitetail buck taunted Tyler Bell, and he couldn’t do much about it. The deer made fleeting appearances on his game cameras, but Tyler never actually saw it with his own eyes—that is until Nov. 1, 2021.

“My next-door neighbor owns about 130 acres and plants gardens every year,” said Tyler, who owns his own landscaping and pressure washing business in his hometown of Dublin. “The deer would get into his gardens. He encourages me to shoot the deer to save his gardens. My brother-in-law hunted this land for several years. I started hunting it in 2016.”

Tyler Bell holds the buck he hunted for five seasons.

Like many Georgia sportsmen, Tyler put up some game cameras to check out the property. Fortunately, he doesn’t need to go far to reach it.

“I hunt about 100 yards from my back doorstep,” he said. “I just walk out of the house and get in my stand. The first time I got the big buck on camera was Oct. 28, 2016. He was a young 8-point then, but I could see he had potential.”

That fall, Tyler hunted the deer hard during bow season. He spread corn and planted food plots in the property, which is dominated by hardwoods. The 8-point never materialized. Over the next five years, Tyler captured images of the big buck regularly but always at night. Despite all his efforts to shoot or arrow that deer, nothing worked. He never saw the deer all that time, but it just kept growing, along with his legend.

“Every year I’d get him on camera,” Tyler said. “I’d only get pictures of him at nighttime. I might get a picture of him once a month, and then he would vanish for a while. He’d come back a few months later.”

On Oct. 16, 2021, Tyler started getting more images of the deer. He even appeared in a peanut field about 5 miles from where Tyler hunts. Then, the big buck returned to Tyler’s hunting property.

“He started showing up over here again,” Tyler said. “I’d get him on camera at about 3 a.m. every night. On Oct. 30, 2021, he showed up again, and I got some video of him so could tell a little more about him. He was huge! On the first of November, I hunted that morning, but didn’t see anything.”

Before the 2021 hunting season began, Tyler established another food plot and cut some shooting lanes by his stand. On the afternoon of Nov. 1, Tyler returned to his stand. He spotted two does that came out about 25 yards away. While watching the does, he spotted another, more distant deer, but couldn’t get a good look at it.

“There’s a lane out from my deer stand, but that area is really shady,” he said. “Hardly any sunlight hits that area. The rut wasn’t even in at the time in my area so the bucks weren’t chasing does. I kept watching the does and saw another deer back in that lane. He would never look in my direction but kept turning away. I couldn’t tell how big he was and didn’t even pull my gun up. Finally, he turned my way. I looked at him for two minutes or longer and couldn’t tell if it was the big deer I had been seeing on camera.”

Waiting for the buck he pursued for five years to show up, Tyler considered passing on this animal standing about 100 yards from his stand. Then, he decided to raise his .243 rifle to get a better look at it and his rack. He considered whether to take the shot or not. With shooting hours rapidly coming to an end for the day, he pulled the trigger at 6:46 p.m. The 95-grain bullet did its job.

“I could tell he was a shooter, so I pulled the trigger,” Tyler said. “I got down about 30 minutes later. When I saw him on the ground, I realized it was the big buck I had been seeing for five years. I had a lot of history with that deer. That was the biggest deer I ever caught on camera. I couldn’t believe it. I had that deer on camera for five years, but the first and only time in my life I ever actually laid eyes on him I didn’t even know it was him and almost let him walk while I waited for the ‘big deer!’”

The 240-lb. whitetail buck carried a 5-by-4 rack with 9 points. He’s not sure yet what the buck will score but estimates it to be 7 years old.

“He was an old deer with a lot of gray in the face,” Tyler said. “He probably wouldn’t have lived much longer. He was probably going to start going downhill next year and die of old age in another year or two. For any landowners or managers out there, if you know you have some good deer on the property and they have potential, let them grow. There’s an old saying that goes something like this: ‘If you want big deer, let small deer walk.’”

Laurens County All-Time Record Bucks