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My First Alpen Buck with Deb Luzinski
 Editor’s Note: Deb Luzinski of Woodbury, Minnesota, near Minneapolis-St.Paul, a deer-removal specialist and bowhunter for deer for 15 years, saves lives and prevents accidents. Luzinski has taken 73 deer with her bow. Five of those deer were antlered bucks, and two were monster-sized whitetails. Through her efforts and those of the members of Minnesota’s Metro Bowhunters Resource Base (MBRB), the number of deer/vehicular accidents was reduced by 150 in one region in Minnesota.
My husband introduced me to bowhunting before we were married, and after the first time I went to a stand, I was hooked. In 2003, I got my first pair of Alpen Apex binoculars, and now, I carry them with me at all times. They stay in my truck, even if I’m not in the woods. I belong to the Metro Bowhunters Resource Base (MBRB), an organization dedicated to managing the deer population in our region. We have 500 members, and we work with our county to remove nuisance deer from county lands and suburban areas.
 On this particular day, we were hunting an area of the county that had been left natural, with over 1,000 acres of woods. I was hunting on the edge of a swamp. I arrived at my stand before daylight and heard the cattails moving, well before legal shooting time. I picked up my Alpen binoculars and spotted a 12-point buck. I couldn’t see the buck with my naked eyes, but through that low light of early morning, I could see him clearly and distinctly with my Alpen Apex binoculars. This buck was definitely a shooter. He’d score between 140 and 150 points on the Pope & Young Club scale. But I never got a shot at him. I watched him come from 60-yards away to right under my tree stand. Although I kept checking my watch in hopes of getting off a shot, in Minnesota, we can’t hunt or take a deer until 1/2-hour before legal sunrise. This buck also must have had a watch, because he came within bow range of me, walked right under my tree and was out of sight before the legal shooting time. I’m not a poacher, so even though this was one of the best bucks I’d ever seen, I wasn’t going to shoot him until the law said I could.
A couple of weeks later, I returned to that stand site. The second morning of my hunt, I spotted the same buck, but he was standing in the cattails out of bow range. I watched him vanish again that morning. I started using my Primos Original CAN to make bleat sounds. I heard a deer coming behind me, dashing through the brush. I saw him come in and walk right around the cottonwood to where I’d set-up my stand. He was 8 yards from my stand when I drew, released my arrow and made a perfect double-lung shot. The buck only ran 20 yards before he dropped. He gross-scored 134 inches.
 I hunt all over the country, but my favorite place to hunt is in my own home county, because I can hunt before or after work and take deer that are creating problems for my county’s residents. The concept of bowhunters removing nuisance deer from suburban areas will continue to grow as the number of deer/vehicular accidents rise. The pilot program that was started here in Minnesota has resulted in bowhunters taking over 2,000 deer in the metropolitan region, with 80% of the deer we take being antlerless deer. The does create the biggest problem because a doe may reproduce 30-additional deer over a 5- to 8- year period. If you take a buck, you’ve just made another buck really happy, because the does still will breed. I really believe in the bowhunter deer-removal program to help manage the deer overpopulation problem in suburban places.
For more information about Minnesota’s deer removal program, visit www.mbrb.org.
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