Photo by Billkenney.com

Please forgive me for beginning this year's trophy-buck overview with a few seemingly negative comments. Even in trophy-rich Missouri, some bucks lack the genetic potential to grow heavyweight antlers. Furthermore, the state has both temporary and permanent pockets of habitat that are incapable of providing the high-quality year-round nutrition needed for even the most genetically blessed buck to reach his potential. Finally, most of Missouri's bucks get struck down by cars, bullets or arrows years before they reach full maturity.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that there's never been a better time to be a trophy deer hunter in Missouri than right now. I know those are bold words. They're also defensible, because the combination of circumstances necessary to produce good numbers of healthy mature bucks (genes, nutrition and longevity) has never before existed over as large a percentage of the Show Me State.

Does that mean finding the stomping grounds of a monster buck will be easy this fall? Hardly. Missouri Department of Conservation deer biologist Lonnie Hansen theorizes that, given the presence of both the right genetic elements and proper nutrition, luck is the primary factor in any given buck's survival through its first two hunting seasons, the crucial time required for a buck to learn that November's blaze-orange clad humans aren't as harmless as May's chatty mushroom hunters.

By "luck," Hansen means that a would-be trophy buck either, by sheer happenstance, chooses a micro-habitat that receives little or no hunting pressure, or he's deliberately let walk -- or missed -- during the first few encounters with hunters. The buck's good luck and the hunter's bad luck aside, locating a trophy buck is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Not only is a trophy buck the exception rather than the norm, but it's also the case that such an animal's core home territory may be as small as 40 acres. Take into consideration that Missouri encompasses about 44.6 million acres, and the term trophy hunter" takes on a whole new meaning.

In an effort to help the readers of Missouri Game & Fish reduce the "playing field" as much as possible, I've traditionally turned to the Missouri Show-Me Big Bucks Club. The MSMBBC is the state's official trophy buck record-keeping organization. While submitting a buck's score (subject to a 140-B&C-point minimum for typicals and a 155-point minimum for non-typicals) to the club is voluntary, club officials are convinced that a majority of the qualifying bucks that are taken in the state are being reported.

Unfortunately, owing to technical problems beyond the control of the club's officers, the physical -- or virtual, if you prefer -- "record book," which is available via subscription through the club's Web site (www.missourishowmebigbucksclub.org) includes only a half-dozen bucks from the 2002 season and none from either 2003 or 2004. Even so, club official Dale Ream wants to assure anyone who has submitted a buck's score since 2001 that his or her buck will be included in the updated book.

Meanwhile, I've decided to base the statistics found in this article on the time period 1992 to 2001. While both you and I would have preferred more recent data, my prior experience leaves me convinced that these data can and will provide an accurate guide to which counties are hot trophy buck producers and which are not.