Game Camera Captures Single Coyote Killing Large Buck

Alabama bowhunter John Hurt had big plans for Saturday, Oct. 22, 2022. He was going to go after a "really nice, tall-racked buck" that he'd been watching on his game camera for several weeks. 

Hurt had been running game cameras in the same general area of the Tuscaloosa County hunting lease for a couple of years, but didn't know the big, old buck was on the property until he moved one of his cameras a few weeks ago. 

"I repositioned my Spartan cellular game camera 125 yards to the left, and that deer just appeared out of nowhere," Hurt says. "My camera sent my phone images of him over a three-week span. He was spending a lot of time right in front of the camera. I could tell he was an old deer and I assumed he was probably stuck in his ways and wouldn't stray far. Finally the conditions were just right to go after him, so I planned to hunt him with my bow on Saturday."

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Hurt says on Friday morning, Oct. 21, he checked his phone to see what images his game camera had captured that night. He was hoping to see the deer, but what he saw made his heart sink. There on his phone were images taken early that morning of a large coyote attacking his trophy buck.

"I thought, 'oh crap.' But, I was hoping the buck got away. After all, it's a big deer and I've never heard of a single coyote taking down a big, mature buck like that. But, my camera sent me another image of the coyote in the field later that afternoon in broad daylight, and it looked to me like it may have had some blood on its feet. When I saw that, I knew that the coyote had likely killed the deer and been feeding on it somewhere nearby because it's unusual to see coyotes in the middle of the day."

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Hurt says he called his friend Brad Martin who lives near the property and asked him to go and check it out. 

"Sure enough, Brad searched the field in front of the camera and found a lot of hair and a few drops of blood. Then he found a puddle of blood and eventually he located the dead deer. The coyote had devoured its hind quarters."

Hurt was, of course, horribly disappointed. He later met up with his friend to examine the deer. 

"Its bases were so large that I could barely wrap my hands around them, and I'm a big guy," Hurt says. "It amazes me that a coyote could take down a deer that size. All I can do is speculate. The deer did seem to be pretty old, which may have made it vulnerable to predators. It may also have been injured or sick, but we didn't see any obvious signs of an injury. We estimate he weighed around 165 pounds, which is small for a deer with that size mass, which supports the idea it was an older buck on its way down. He had nine main-frame points and a bunch of long stickers that would make him an atypical 15 point."

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Hurt says when he went back to study his photos, he noticed that when the coyote first showed up in the field, the deer fled, but then returned time and again.

"I saw the deer and then the coyote, but the deer wouldn't leave the area. My camera kept capturing images of the deer 15 minutes apart until the coyote finally attacked. Who knows why the deer wouldn't run away, as it clearly saw the coyote way before it attacked."