Each new deer season starts with spring trail cam pics of bucks with just an inch or two of velvet-covered bone protruding from their skulls and the anticipation on what they will grow over the course of the coming months.  As the season progresses and with each card pull, the bucks (some we're very familiar with and some that are new) begin to blossom and give us small previews of their potential headgear they will be sporting for the season.  During July, the bucks really start to put on the inches, as many as 1/2 inch to an inch per day.  Usually by mid-August, we have a pretty good idea on what their final product will be for the year.  But, even though the bucks are done growing, we still anticipate the first hard horn pics of this hit listers to get a true representation of what we will be chasing during the upcoming season.  We'll look at every picture we have and start adding up inches to try to guess the bucks final gross score, hoping that we'll be able to tape that buck out with our own hands during the fall.

Well this past weekend, we finally got the first hard horn picture of the year, and it just so happened to be of one of our top hit list bucks of the year.  Amazingly, Mr. T provided us his final full velvet picture just over 24 hours prior to his full hard horned picture.  Hard to believe that he was able to rub all of that velvet off and clean up those long tines in such a short amount of time.