Photo by Mark Werner

There are many deer running through the woods and fields of Minnesota, but how many of them have racks worthy of making other hunters envious? That question is a lot more difficult to answer than may be expected.

An examination of the record books reveals that Minnesota is well represented across the categories of typical, non-typical, firearm, archery and muzzleloader kills. Our state is home to the second-highest number of Boone and Crockett entries behind Iowa. Also, northeastern Minnesota's St. Louis County is tied for No. 1 with Wisconsin's Buffalo County for most big-buck entries since 1830.

All the trophy-buck information that exists is collected by private individuals and organizations such as the Boone and Crockett Club. They rely on deer hunters to submit their information, meaning they can only keep track of those deer that are reported. On the other hand, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources keeps track of every deer legally harvested in the state by permit area.

Even though they keep track of every deer, the DNR does not keep records regarding the potential trophy status of bucks, said Lou Cornicelli, big-game program coordinator for the Minnesota DNR. "We don't monitor the numbers of deer based on the size of its rack, only whether it is an adult or fawn and whether it is a male or female," he said.

Assuming a "trophy" buck is one with a rack having at least four 7-inch tines on each main beam, DNR biologists estimate that the number of bucks with these measurements number less than 1 percent of the annual kill. Considering that 260,000 deer were taken last year, the number of harvested trophy bucks should have numbered around 2,500. That's an impressive number until you consider the fact that there were over 500,000 hunters. If mathematic rules were kind to hunters and spread it out so that each hunter could only kill one trophy in a lifetime, it would still take each hunter an average of 200 years.

The question still lingers -- where do you find these trophy bucks?

Every year in early March, thousands of hunters venture to the State Fairgrounds in The Cities for the Minnesota Deer Classic where plenty of trophy bucks are on display and being scored. Hunters admire the impressive mounts from the previous season as well as the largest typical and non-typical bucks taken from North America over the years. Show coordinator Hugh Price manages the records for the show but said he still has to rely on hunters to report their harvest.

One of the reasons for the Minnesota Deer Classic is to show hunters that trophies do exist throughout the state. Every county in Minnesota has recorded at least one trophy white-tailed buck. Most hunters report the county where they killed the deer, but there is no surefire way to determine the accuracy of those numbers.

"What we've found is that 90 percent of the time the hunter lives near where they hunt and only a small percent hunt far away from their home," Price said.

A county-by-county breakdown is great until you try to pinpoint where in the county that deer was killed. Minnesota's zones and permit areas do not always follow county lines, and most counties include several permit areas. This "disconnect" in the data makes it difficult to decipher exactly where the big bucks are coming from year to year.