David Byrd’s Lee County buck scored 156 5/8 P&Y points and was the largest taken by bow in the state last season. Leesburg taxidermist Grayson Roberts created the mount. Photo by Steve Ruckel.

Often, running late can lead to bad things -- a couple of speeding tickets from my youth immediately come to mind.

But sometimes tardiness produces wonderful and unexpected results. Such was the case for David Byrd last deer season.

Byrd, the 42-year-old general manager of a 10,000-acre farming and dairy operation in northern Lee County, has hunted the family-owned property since he was in the seventh grade. Much of the farm is composed of pasture and cropland interspersed with stands of planted pines, all of it divided by hardwood bottoms associated with Kinchafoonee, Muckalee and Muckaloochee creeks. The excellent habitat couples with trophy genes among the local whitetails and a very low buck harvest of only three or four bucks each year to make for hunting opportunity that most can only dream about.

Like many youngsters, Byrd took his first deer by rifle, but after harvesting a number of trophies in succeeding years, the hunter became interested in the additional challenge that archery hunting afforded. David Campbell, a longtime college friend, is credited with really stoking Byrd’s bowhunting fever.

A number of does and four small-to-medium bucks have fallen to Byrd’s broadheads, but nothing remotely approaching the 153 7/8-inch bruiser he downed with a rifle back in 1994 -- not until this past season, that is!

Not surprisingly, the first week of the 2006 South Georgia bow season found afternoon temperatures still hovering in the 90s. It was miserably hot, especially for afternoon hunting, but that was what Byrd had been doing since opening day on Sept. 9. A peanut field on a distant part of the farm was drawing a crowd of deer every evening, including some shooter bucks that Byrd had been seeing regularly. Unfortunately, he had yet to get one in range of his compound bow, in spite of four evenings of being in the field.

On the afternoon of Sept. 13, Byrd rushed home to change into his hunting clothes after getting delayed at work. Thinking that by the time he got over to his stand on the peanut field the deer might already be out munching on the goobers he decided to call his buddy David Campbell and ask his advice about where to go. “David said, ‘Why don’t you hunt that stand close to your house where you saw the big buck?’” he recalled.

Why that hadn’t occurred to him was a momentary mystery that washed right out of his mind as he grabbed his bow and headed for his ATV. The image of a huge 8-pointer that he’d seen several times during the summer and fall of 2005 now reappeared in his memory. Along with two other bucks that always seemed to run with it, the big buck hung out in an area only a few hundred yards from Byrd’s house.

As if in a cerebral slide show, that image was followed by another of a massive 10-pointer still in velvet that Byrd and his son, Austin, had jumped from the same area while they’d been mowing strips through a fallow field just two weeks before.

The big buck, accompanied by two smaller ones, looked like the same deer he had seen last year -- but now it was larger. A day or two later Byrd had placed a ladder stand against a large pine on the mowed strip exactly where the buck had been standing.

The sound of the Polaris ATV roaring to life brought Byrd back into the present. Still thinking about the velvet buck, he drove to within 200 yards of the stand, parked and dismounted. It was already past 6:30 p.m. “When I stepped into the mowed strip to walk to my stand,” Byrd said, “there was a small buck standing down there right by my stand.”