On December 13, 2021, Logan Harlan carried a late-season buck tag onto New Mexico public land in hopes of discovering a good-sized whitetail. After a couple of unsuccessful days together with his dad Larry and sister-in-law Lorri, the group ultimately eyed a big 6-by-6 on public land—a rarity within the closely checkerboarded area they had been looking. Logan watched the buck for a grueling 5 and a half hours and belly-crawled a couple of hundred yards earlier than ultimately firing a shot together with his 6.5 Creedmor. The buck went down immediately. This perseverance and grit shouldn’t come as a shock to anybody who is aware of the Harlan household. They personal a taxidermy studio and reserving company and, in line with their Instagram and Fb profiles, they dwell to hunt.
Whitetail deer aren’t precisely a high recreation species in New Mexico. Coues’ whitetails and Jap whitetails, which New Mexico Sport and Fish refers to as “Texas whitetails”, comprise roughly 5 % of the annual deer harvest statewide. Mule deer make up the opposite 95 %. This skewed ratio lends to a reasonably jarring statistic: Solely two New Mexico whitetail deer have ever graced the Boone & Crockett document e book.
Or, no less than, that was the case till Harlan took his shot in late 2021. After the requisite 60-day drying interval, his typical 6-by-6 scored 176 ⅞ inches. This rating would have been even greater had the buck not damaged off its left primary beam, however it was nonetheless sufficient to edge out the earlier document holder, Samuel Beatty, by a half-inch. (The shortage of New Mexico whitetails is so excessive that B&C doesn’t keep non-typical information within the state regardless that the primary two record-book whitetails had been 6-by-5s.)
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That is normally the second the place the looking media frenzy hoists Harlan within the air and celebrates his success. However that didn’t occur in February 2022, when the drying interval would have ended and the document would have modified fingers. Actually, not many individuals actually knew in regards to the buck till North American Whitetails revealed the primary recognized article about Harlan’s hunt on July 17, roughly 17 months after the drying interval ended.
It’s unclear why it took so lengthy for the story of Harlan’s buck to floor. As of proper now, NMGF hasn’t up to date the document e book on its web site. (NMGF didn’t instantly reply to OL’s requests for remark.) However Harlan’s identify and scoresheet now reside within the B&C e book on the high of the New Mexico information, proper the place they belong.
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