Field Judging Poll #1 Aftermath

As many readers suspected we were targeting the buck in Poll #1 for one of our hunters. We took him July 5th at 7:15 AM from 235 yards away. Dr. David Meyer used his custom Norma 6XC shooting 105 grain Berger bullets.

Dr. Meyer's buck had these body measurements:

Eye: 1 7/8
Ear: 7 2/8
Face: 7 6/8
Eye to Eye: 5 3/8
Chest: 15 4/8

The ear may be a tad long and the face a tad short, but overall they're very normal measurements for Arizona which makes it much easier to field judge correctly. 

All scores are green scores and subject to way too much excitement and blurry vision and high-fiving, etc...

Length: 17
The buck did seem to grow since I took the pictures that were posted in the first poll. Those pictures were taken on June 4th, 32 days before the green score. In those 32 days it appears, from the photos, that the buck grew anywhere from 2/8 to 6/8 inches of length. This means that most all of us, on average, probably nailed the length when we guessed 16 3/8. If we were under a smidgen that's OK, too, since it's better than guessing too big and being disappointed.

June 4th

One month later

Prong: 6
His long prong is probably closer to the crowd's guess of 6 2/8, but his short prong (the one B&C cares about) is closer to my guess of 6. However, both guesses were basically right on the money given each one nailed one of the two prongs.

Bottom Mass: 14 6/8
The crowd was pretty close on this as well with a guess of 14 1/8. My guess was 14 7/8. His base did tighten up just a bit before we killed him as we suspected it might.

Top Mass: Almost 9!
This is the one where the crowd and I both guessed too low. We may have misplaced the tape by a few eighths since we didn't measure the exact spot to put the measurements, but the prong ended up over 8 inches high which puts that 2nd Q measurement nearly right on top of the prong. You can see from the ground photo that right above the prong is as wide as the buck's eye is across. Any time you can get that measurement to fall on top of the prong it will be a lot bigger than even just a half inch up. 

All of this adds up to around 93 inches.