05/05/2026
This deer is somewhat sentimental to me, even though I didn't have any part in killing it. But I definitely was part of the celebratory texts, pictures and phone calls.
A friend of mine actually killed this deer in 2011. It's one stud of a public land bow kill, and he was so stoked when he killed him. My friend had been hunting this public spot for years and put in a bit of work to get to an out of the way spot. He put in all day sits at this place regularly.
My buddy dabbled in taxidermy. So just like some of us taxidermists tend to do, he managed to put off mounting this deer for a looooooong time. I'm guilty of that myself. But ultimately, he waited too long, because in early October of 2023 he passed away very unexpectedly.
Fast forward a little bit and I get a message from his son asking about some of the deer that were left over that his dad never got around to mounting. In that conversation he asked if I would be willing to mount any of them....but this buck in particular. So I was honored to do so. I can still remember the texts and pictures and phone call as soon as he got back home. Since he passed way so suddenly, it was always surreal that he was just gone and I felt like this might give me a little closure.
This friend was always very complimentary of my taxidermy work. He had been around the deer world long enough to have seen the worst of the worst in taxidermy. He would comment about how my quality stacked up against other taxidermists he had seen, but he always had one criticism about the pictures I posted. He would make comments about how my deer looked so nice from the front in the pictures I took, but he nearly begged me to take pictures of the back of the head. He mentioned that so many people used to judge "quality" taxidermy by whether or not you could see stitches down the incision on the back. He would say that if I wanted to impress some people, I really should post pictures of the back of the head to prove to people that I don't cut corners back there.
I mostly blew off his recommendations about taking pictures of the back of the head. But you might notice a couple pictures, in this post, from angles that you haven't seen from me in the past
So here's to you Jeff. I miss the conversations, the hunting trips.....and the advice on how to impress people with photos of my taxidermy work. I hope my "stitch job" would make you proud!!
