The day after big game hunter Shelly Sayer’s potential world-record bull moose was inspected in Idaho, another hunter’s Idaho bull stretched the tape measure. A Shiras’ moose in velvet arrowed at 50 yards by Drew Stamerjohn of Illinois on Tuesday could be a new world-record bull.
“[The bull] surprised us. We don’t have much history on him,” Deadline Outfitters owner Hoby Gartner tells Outdoor Life. “He was so big, we really underestimated him. We knew he would break the record, but we didn’t know how big he was until we walked up to him. He had unbelievable body size.”
Gartner guided Stamerjohn’s once-in-a-lifetime bull moose hunt in Idaho’s Sawtooth National Forest on Sept. 1. There’s only one non-resident tag for the unit and it’s the same area where Gartner guided resident hunter Shelly Sayer to her own massive bull on the Aug. 30 opener.
“I want a healthy unit and I want to keep it that way. These moose mean a lot to us and this is something that’s really special,” Gartner says. “We work hard for these moments, but the rest of our hunters are just as important as the records so we have to move on.”
Footage from the hunt shows Stamerjohn arrowing the bull, which was with another moose, in a stand of dead conifers.
The Likely New Archery World-Record Velvet Shiras Moose
Idaho hosts up to 12,000 moose statewide, up from a few thousand a 50 years ago. The weapon-of-choice, once-in-a-lifetime hunt is hard to draw and every moose harvested has to be inspected by Idaho Department of Fish and Game. They pull teeth for aging and collect blood samples plus tissue samples for disease testing.
“We only harvest a small number of the moose in this state,” says Dan Garren, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game southeast regional supervisor who saw Sayer’s moose come through for inspection. “We want as much information as we can get to better manage that population.”
Tick load is often a problem for moose, but both Sayer’s moose and Stamerjohn’s moose appeared relatively healthy.
“When they start stripping that velvet, they are a different character,” Gartner says. “And velvet can be stripped overnight. To kill them big and kill them early in the season with velvet is rare.”
Although Stamerjohn’s moose is now at an Idaho taxidermy shop ahead of its official scoring in 60 days.
Idaho’s average moose measures 35 inches wide. Stamerjohn’s archery bull measures 55 4/8 inches wide, with a gross green score of 190 4/8 inches and a net score of 185 inches. The bull must wait the obligatory 60-day drying period before it can be officially scored for the record books. The Pope & Young Club, which manages archery records, also requires potential world-record animals to be panel scored.
The current P&Y world-record velvet Shiras bull was killed in Teton County, Wyoming, in 2005 by Donald Hoard. His bull scored 161 and 6/8. P&Y began allowing velvet animals to qualify for awards, including world-records, in 2020.
Read Next: This Idaho Bull Could Be the New All-Time World-Record Shiras Moose
Even with the 60-day drying period ahead, it would be surprising if Stamerjohn’s bull doesn’t qualify for the world-record.
“He beats the record by so far,” Gartner says, “it’s unbelievable.”
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