Jordan Taylor of Jacksonville and his stepfather, George Sitgreaves, have had a 100-acre lease in Northeast Florida for four years. Taylor prefers to stay out of the lease until he’s ready to hunt it, so as not to spook deer.
He knows the area well from years of hunting there. And on the morning of Sept. 20, the 35-year-old electrician crept into a strip of woods where, in prior years, big bucks were taken.
“I don’t use a flashlight because it can spook deer and our bucks are jittery,” Taylor tells Outdoor Life. “That’s why I slip in to hunt just as day is breaking and I can find my way to a spot I want to hunt.”
He noticed several active scrapes and rubs as he headed for a cypress tree where he could get up high in a climbing stand. The hardwoods are only 40 yards wide and connect a swamp and a creek. It makes for the perfect deer travel corridor — and an ideal bowhunting spot.
Taylor climbed 14 feet up the cypress and saw his first deer, a spike, at 7:23 a.m. Next, he saw an 8-point buck that rubbed a nearby tree and stayed in the area for a couple minutes.
“The eight-pointer passed by my stand at seven yards, and eventually moved off,” he says. “That’s when I blew on my grunt tube a few times but didn’t get any response.”
Nearly an hour later he heard a deer blowing in the distance. Taylor noted the wind, which was ideal, and knew the whitetail hadn’t caught his scent.
“That’s when I made a short grunt call again, and a deer responded with a deep growl. Fifteen minutes later a heavy buck came along the same trail the spike had walked. I didn’t see the deer more than five seconds from the time I spotted him until I shot him.”
When the buck was at 14 yards, Taylor released an arrow.
Taylor watched as the deer ran barely 30 yards and fell dead.
“I’ve shot a lot of deer with that [15-year-old] bow in a lot of different places, and it works just fine for me,” he says.
Taylor made a video of himself recovering the buck, which he saw fall in tall grass. The video shows the hyperventilating excitement of the hunt.
Taylor has not had the buck officially scored. But the deer’s heavy-beamed and dark-colored rack has 17 total points and 14 scorable points. He estimates it’s 4.5 years old, and it weighed 160 pounds.
“I don’t have cameras on the property, and we don’t feed corn, but I knew the deer was around from photos a friend had on his hunting land one mile away from our place.”
In many regions of the country, Taylor’s buck is a nice one that any hunter would be happy to kill. But a free-ranging deer of such size and age in Florida’s palmetto scrub country is a giant among giants. Many hunters twice as old as Taylor rarely if ever see a buck of such quality.
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“I’ve been fortunate to hunt deer in a lot of great places in Alabama and Kansas, but taking a buck like this one is special,” says Taylor.
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