'Most Famous Collared Deer' Bagged by Hunter

Buck No. 140 has crossed the Mississippi River for the last time. The huge deer, famous for what researchers call a "mobile personality," was bagged by a Mississippi hunter last weekend, the Clarion-Ledger reports. Over the course of a study that began in December 2020, Buck No. 140 surprised researchers—and caught the public's attention—with a migration pattern that took him across the river four times, swimming around a mile each way as he moved 18 miles from his winter range in Mississippi to his summer range in Louisiana. His GPS collar dropped off in November, as it had been programmed to do. With their study over, researchers at the Mississippi State University Deer Lab encouraged hunters to shoot the buck so they could determine whether he carried chronic wasting disease, Field & Stream reports.

Trevor Martin, who won a drawing to hunt in the Ten Point Unit of the Phil Bryant Wildlife Management Area, a protected area of Mississippi Delta wetland forest, says he spotted the buck near the treeline. He says that after he determined the buck's antlers were big enough to make the kill legal, he shot it from around 200 yards without having noticed its ear tags. "I had to walk 150 to 200 yards and when I lifted his rack I noticed he had the tags and I said, 'Oh, God.' I was just ecstatic. Me and my friend were like a couple of school girls freaking out. I've never killed a buck like that."

"Me and my buddy were actually reading the story in the Clarion-Ledger prior to coming up here," Martin says. "We've been following the stories about him swimming the Mississippi River a mile. That's crazy." Deer Lab researchers, who describe Buck No. 140 as the "most famous GPS-collared white-tailed deer in North America," say the deer could provide extreme valuable information on the spread of CWD. Buck No. 140 was one of 92 bucks fitted with tracking collars as part of a MSU study that found some deer in the region have mobile personalities and others have sedentary personalities and do not relocate during winter like deer in colder climates do. They found that 30% of the bucks had multiple home ranges, and No. 140 was "the most extreme mobile-personality buck." (More deer stories.)