Rancher’s video set is the best

DALLAS MORNING NEWS

DALLAS — During a recent bout with whatever upper respiratory crud is going around these days, I whiled away an entire afternoon watching hunting videos. After the marathon session, I’m ready to ordain Jack Brittingham’s “Best of Buck Fever” to be the best white-tailed deer hunting video I’ve ever seen — hands down. Nothing I’ve seen even comes close.

The two=volume set contains 224 minutes of highlights from 10 years of unbelievable hunting action. Brittingham is perhaps Texas’ best archery hunter and its most successful. He’s also a controversial figure because of his high-fenced ranches and his whitetail breeding program at Briar Lakes Ranch near Athens.

A lot of modern hunters believe that genetically improved deer are merely glorified livestock and no animal killed behind a game-proof fence should ever be recognized for anything.

Having said that, the quality of deer pictured in these videos and the quality of the video itself has no equal in the deer hunting video business. Brittingham, who’s independently wealthy, said he got into the video game by accident.

When he bought and high-fenced an Illinois ranch, he knew it would be four or five years before the bucks were big enough to hunt, so he started shooting video as a way to document the deer. By studying video, he was better able to chart a buck’s development and could more accurately determine its age and the size of its antlers.

By the time he started hunting the Illinois deer, Brittingham, his friends and ranch managers were pretty good hands with a video camera. It was a logical step from documenting the bucks to documenting the hunts.

After a few years, the single-minded hunter realized he was sitting on an impressive video archive, and he started his video company, Briar Lakes Productions. (Information at www.jackbrittingham.com.)

He’s since produced hunting videos from around the world, but most of the hunts in his Buck Fever series were filmed on ranches that he owns in Athens and South Texas. He sold the Illinois ranch after realizing that he could grow bucks just as big in East Texas as in the Midwest.

Six of the bucks that Brittingham arrows on the Best of Buck Fever score more than 200 gross Boone and Crockett points. Four others score above 190. There are an amazing 23 bucks on these videos that score above 170 gross B&C points.

There’s a lot of footage of bucks from one year to the next. With nearly every buck killed, there is posted the deer’s age and its gross B&C score.

Not all hunts turned out successful. Brittingham includes heartbreaking blown shots at enormous bucks and relives bucks he hunted without releasing an arrow. At Athens, he hunted a buck that he called Blue for a documented 500 hours over two seasons and only saw the deer once.

The 8-year-old buck’s remains were found by NASA when crews searched across the ranch looking for debris after the space shuttle tragedy.

I knew most of these stories, but I still enjoyed seeing the magical animals, particularly those that proved unhuntable. On an East Texas hunt, Jack and his son, Trevor, came up on two bucks with their antlers locked together from fighting. One buck was already dead, but they managed to free the other one.

In South Texas, Jack and a hunting companion heard the sounds of a buck fight beside a ranch road and hurried in on the deer, which were likewise locked. One of the locked bucks was the deer they were hunting, and Jack’s friend eventually got a shot with his bow.

They had to tackle the dead deer’s still-live opponent and use a reciprocating saw to cut its antler beam, freeing it from its dead adversary.

There’s plenty of other whitetail behavior, including some you’ve seen on other videos, but not by bucks as big as those on The Best of Buck Fever.