New Mexico Has a New No. 1 Whitetail

On December 13, 2021, Logan Harlan carried a late-season buck tag onto New Mexico public land in hopes of discovering a good-sized whitetail. After a number of unsuccessful days together with his dad Larry and sister-in-law Lorri, the group finally eyed a big 6-by-6 on public land—a rarity within the closely checkerboarded area they had been searching. Logan watched the buck for a grueling 5 and a half hours and belly-crawled a number of hundred yards earlier than finally firing a shot together with his 6.5 Creedmor. The buck went down immediately. This perseverance and grit shouldn’t come as a shock to anybody who is aware of the Harlan household. They personal a taxidermy studio and reserving company and, in keeping with their Instagram and Fb profiles, they reside to hunt.

Whitetail deer aren’t precisely a high sport species in New Mexico. Coues’ whitetails and Jap whitetails, which New Mexico Sport and Fish refers to as “Texas whitetails”, comprise roughly 5 % of the annual deer harvest statewide. Mule deer make up the opposite 95 %. This skewed ratio lends to a relatively jarring statistic: Solely two New Mexico whitetail deer have ever graced the Boone & Crockett report ebook.

Or, not less than, that was the case till Harlan took his shot in late 2021. After the requisite 60-day drying interval, his typical 6-by-6 scored 176 ⅞ inches. This rating would have been even increased had the buck not damaged off its left major beam, but it surely was nonetheless sufficient to edge out the earlier report holder, Samuel Beatty, by a half-inch. (The shortage of New Mexico whitetails is so excessive that B&C doesn’t keep non-typical data within the state despite the fact that the first two record-book whitetails had been 6-by-5s.)

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That is often the second the place the searching media frenzy hoists Harlan within the air and celebrates his success. However that didn’t occur in February 2022, when the drying interval would have ended and the report would have modified arms. Actually, not many individuals actually knew in regards to the buck till North American Whitetails printed the primary identified article about Harlan’s hunt on July 17, roughly 17 months after the drying interval ended.

It’s unclear why it took so lengthy for the story of Harlan’s buck to floor. As of proper now, NMGF hasn’t up to date the report ebook on its web site. (NMGF didn’t instantly reply to OL’s requests for remark.) However Harlan’s identify and scoresheet now reside within the B&C ebook on the high of the New Mexico data, proper the place they belong.

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