Tales from the Timber: Voelker

Glenn Voelker has been hunting deer since 1964.

Never had he seen a buck quite like the 10-pointer he shot out of a ground blind on opening day of the 2008-09 firearm deer hunting season.

The Monroe County buck field-dressed at 184 pounds, but that’s not what caught Voelker’s eye the most. The big buck also had velvet on most of its rack.

“It’s normally all rubbed off,” Voelker told Rod Kloeckner of the Belleville News-Democrat. “That’s what the taxidermist told me. He said it’s unique. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. He said you don’t find deer in velvet during gun season. You see them in Missouri during bow season, but that starts in September.”

Voelker is a 64-year-old grain farmer from Fults and had his buck mounted by Herb Klein, owner of Klein Taxidermy in Saint Mary’s, Mo. Klein said he’d seen a buck in velvet that late into the season only one time in 40 years in the business.

“I’ve mounted over 10,000 deer, and I’ve only seen one like it,” Klein told Kloeckner. “That was at a taxidermy show 25 years ago. I thought maybe (Voelker’s) was fake, it was that unusual. Most of the time, that velvet is long gone. He had rubbed some, because it was partially peeled. It looked like if your pants exploded. It was unbelievable.”

Typically bucks with a rack still carrying velvet have damaged or missing testicals. But Voelker said his buck had all its male parts.

“They looked black,” Voelker said of the buck’s antlers. “I really didn’t notice they were in velvet. It actually fell in the creek, and one side of the antlers was sticking out of the water. It looked kind of goofy and it was ugly, but it was unique in the way it is. It’s different.

“He never rubbed his antlers at all. The tips of the antlers were like nails. They were sharp. They were not rounded at all. He apparently didn’t rub his rack at all to get it off.”

Prior to his velvet buck, Klein said the strangest deer he had encountered was an albino buck shot by a friend several years ago.