Tiny Mississippi buck is a trophy of a lifetime: 127 inches and less than 100 pounds

A buck scoring 127 is a good deer and one that could make into the Magnolia Records Program which keeps records of bucks scoring 125 or more. Even so, it’s not the kind of deer that would typically make headlines.

However, when antlers like that are on a mature Mississippi buck that doesn’t even weigh 95 pounds, it becomes almost legendary.

James Keel of Hernando said he was hunting in the North Mississippi Delta on the morning of Dec. 16, and it was a slow hunt. Keel said he hadn’t even seen a squirrel, much less a deer. That changed at about 8:30.

“I heard rustling to my right side and saw a doe and he was chasing her,” Keel said. “I said, ‘There’s no way that rack goes with that deer.’

“When I saw him coming he was running through the woods. I knew he was a small deer, but I didn’t know exactly how small he was.”

Hunter realizes buck is tiny

It would be a while before Keel found out exactly how small the buck was. Keel shot the deer and tracked it about 250 yards, but the blood trail stopped. He called dog handler Chad Myers of Tunica and asked him to bring a tracking dog.

Meyers came that night and his dog located the buck. When Keel got the deer back to his camp, he began to realize what he had.

“I was almost in shock at how small of a body he really was,” Keel said. “He felt like you’re holding a Lab.

“When I held that deer up, Chad’s dog was eye-to-eye with it. He was the size of a mature Lab.”

Keel put the buck on a scale and it weighed 93.9 pounds. He said a local processor estimated the age to be 3 or 4 years old. It came from an area where Keel said a mature buck should weigh 200 pounds.

For its size, the buck’s antlers are astounding. It’s a main-frame 8-point with split G2s. The bases measure 4 4/8 inches and the main beams are 20 4/8 inches. The G2s are 8 6/8 inches and 9 inches with an inside spread of 14 inches. Its unofficial gross score is 127 3/8 inches.

To put it in perspective, that’s like a 190-pound buck having antlers scoring over 250 inches.

What causes dwarf deer?

Stories of dwarf deer, sometimes called short bucks, have circulated for decades. The explanations generally revolved around small deer being brought to the state in the days when deer were imported by the state to restock the population. Some speculation has been that those genes still show up from time to time.

However, if small deer were ever actually brought into the state, it was a long time ago.

“That’s been decades and decades since the state brought deer in here,” said Russ Walsh, Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks’ Wildlife chief of staff. “You hear about the small Mexican deer and the old Wisconsin blue bucks. You hear people talk about that, but I wouldn’t be quick to throw it back to that.”

Instead, Walsh said he thinks it’s an anomaly linked to an issue with a chromosome.

Another mini Mississippi buck

Whatever causes dwarf deer doesn’t appear common. An internet search revealed only a handful of images of similar deer and coincidentally, at least one of them came from Mississippi.

In 2018, Lesley Cannada of Hinds County shot what she thought was a monster buck on her farm. When she walked to it, she realized something was wrong.

The buck weighed 117.6 pounds. He was aged by a biologist at 5 1/2 years old. He came from a property where the average weight of mature bucks is well over 200 pounds with one weighing 295 pounds.

“There’s normal variation in their body weight, but I’ve never seen one that small,” said Kamen Campbell, MDWFP Southwest Region Private Lands biologist in a 2018 interview with the Clarion Ledger. “A 110-pound mature buck is unheard of. I’ve looked at data from over 30,000 deer, and I’ve never seen one like it.”

And like Keel’s buck, the antlers on Cannada’s buck were disproportionally large. It gross-scored 129.

A trophy buck to remember

Keel said he knew the buck was quite unusual from the start, but after discussing it with people and reading comments on social media about it, he realized it was more significant than he initially thought.

So, instead of the typical shoulder mount, he plans to have a full-body mount.

“I think it’s something I’ll never see again in my life,” Keel said. “I’ve always wanted a house with a hunting room and it would be a great piece with a story to it. I don’t think pictures do it justice of how he really is.”