Billings hunter thought he scored his biggest buck yet

Curtis Russell's first chance at the big 22-point whitetail was disrupted before he could take the shot.

"I saw it in a field with a group of six other deer, but a coyote came in and busted me — all the deer blew out," he said, recalling his November hunt in a Christian County field.

Russell, 32, came back the next day, looking for the deer with a huge rack on its head. Twenty minutes before sunset, he spotted the deer among a group of does and one small buck. The bigger whitetail used its antlers to keep the smaller male at a distance.

"I did a 50-yard belly crawl to cut the distance and got to within 175 yards," Russell said. "I was using a Remington 700 .30-06, and when I took the shot it was a clean hit. It was dead before it hit the ground."

Now for the biggest surprise in Russell's 26 years of deer hunting: The buck wasn't a buck at all. It was a freak of nature, a doe sporting a huge set of antlers.

"It took me a minute looking at all the tell-tale signs, but it was missing male genitalia," Russell said. "Its face wasn't like a buck's, it was real petite, and she had a great deal of fat on her. I've taken a lot of deer but this had the biggest set of antlers, indeed."

Emily Flinn, a deer biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, said Russell's antlered doe was "definitely very rare."

"Each year Missouri hunters take 250,000 to 300,000 deer and we only get a handful of antlered does reported to me," Flinn said.

Most of those have small sets of horns, typically permanently covered in velvet. Russell's deer had thick antlers and had been rubbed hard enough to remove nearly all the velvet.

Flinn said an antlered doe occurs because of a hormone imbalance that causes higher levels of male testosterone to be present, causing antlers to grow. Some antlered does turn out to be hermaphrodites having both male and female sex organs.

Both conditions are very rare, Flinn said.

Russell said he sent his deer to a Polk County taxidermist. Because of its rarity and the size of its antlers, the deer might land in a whitetail museum. But if not it'll join other deer mounts at his home in Billings.

"I've got bucks on the wall, but this would be the first doe with antlers," he said.