Columbian Whitetail Deer: The Prince of the Pacific Northwest

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I stood on a high ridge overlooking Oregon’s Umpqua River, which cut a winding route through the choppy hills of the western half of the state. It had been two days since I’d missed a shot at a Columbian whitetail, the big country and diminutive deer causing me to overestimate the range and send the Nosler ballistic tip high over the buck’s back. Now I was punishing myself, or being punished by my outfitter Jody Smith, by still-hunting from the river valley through the oak motts lining the surrounding finger ridges. While that may not sound like punishment to some, my Nebraska-bred lungs and flatlander legs weren’t prepared for these impossibly steep hillsides the Columbian whitetails call home.

Sweat dripping into my eyes, I stopped to shed my flannel shirt and catch my breath just a hundred or so yards from the top. At that moment, Smith, along with Petersen’s HUNTING whitetail columnist Will Brantley and photographer Justin Moore, bounced over the ridge in a side-by-side and headed down the finger toward me. Smith deemed I’d been appropriately disciplined, or didn’t want a dead hunter on his hands, and had come to pick me up.

“Get in Darby,” Smith barked. “It’s time to eat lunch.”

I’ve had a lot of nicknames in my life, but, inexplicably, Smith tagged me with Darby during a Roosevelt elk hunt a few years earlier and the sobriquet stuck. As the saying goes, call me anything you want, but don’t call me late for dinner, so I shucked the round from my Nosler 21 and slid into the back seat of the side-by-side. As we wound our way back down to the river’s edge, I wondered how we were going to find a Lilliputian deer in this Brobdingnag country.

Small Deer, Big Success

Unlike the big, corn-fed whitetails I was used to hunting in the Midwest, Columbian whitetails are positively tiny. Standing about a third shorter at the shoulders than a common whitetail, bucks would be hard pressed to break 120 lbs. on the scale. From my limited experience, I’d put that number closer to 100 lbs.

Like their bodies, the rack of a Columbian whitetail doesn’t grow to the comparatively giant racks of most deer. Its antlers remind me of a tiara balanced atop the head of young prince. Record keeping for them is hard to come by, and currently only Safari Club International recognizes the Columbian as a separate subspecies of whitetail. The largest buck on record—a nontypical—scores 144 1/8 points by SCI’s measurement process. The largest typical: 138 1/8. Suffice to say, you don’t hunt Columbian whitetails to fill ample space on your trophy room wall.

Traditionally, the deer were once native to parts of Oregon and Washington. Like most western whitetails, they prefer riparian habitat, not unlike that found along the Columbia River (hence the deer’s name) and other waterways in the Pacific Northwest, including the Umpqua. There is no estimate of Columbian deer populations when the first pioneers reached the end of the Oregon Trail in the mid-1800s, but little more than 100 years later—in 1968—the deer were on the verge of extinction. It seems human encroachment and subsequent habitat loss were too much for the tiny deer to bear and numbers plummeted. With the passing of the Endangered Species Act in 1978, Columbian whitetail were officially recognized as endangered.

I’d say we’re lucky to be able to hunt Columbian whitetails at all, except it’s not luck that brought the subspecies back from the brink of extinction. Like most conservation success stories, sportsmen played a large role for Oregon’s population of whitetails to have reached huntable numbers. At the urging of hunters and with the support and protection of the ESA, biologists and program managers from the Oregon and Washington wildlife departments and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put a program in place to protect the few remaining Columbian whitetails in existence in the Columbia River valley and along the Umpqua in southwestern Oregon.

Twenty-five years after the federal designation as endangered the Columbian whitetail population along the Umpqua was deemed recovered enough to be removed from under the yoke of federal protection. The Columbia River population is still challenged, though it too has succeeded in the face of extinction. Just a few years ago, that herd was moved from endangered status to threatened and shows healthy signs of growing as its habitat is protected.

Here, above the banks of the Umpqua, the Columbian whitetail herd has recovered enough to allow a few select hunters to stalk them. The first modern season took place in 2005, with just a few licenses approved. Nearly 20 years later, tags are still hard to come by, with less than 100 available through either the state’s draw system or guaranteed landowner tags often managed by local outfitters. It was the latter I was blessed to be carrying last fall.

Anatomy of a Miss

Because these tags are so coveted, and the chance to hunt Columbian whitetail is rare enough to be considered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Jody Smith puts in the time to ensure his client’s success. He scouts year-round and runs an arsenal of trail cameras on the large properties he manages. The night before opening day he swiped through an album of images on his phone, detailing each buck and its habits for me and Brantley. Because his property also abuts the North Bank Habitat Management Area—one of the few public-hunting opportunities for Columbian whitetails—there was also the chance we’d encounter new bucks bounced off the management area by opening-day hunters.

That morning Smith pointed me down a steep hill to a relatively flat spot that would serve as a sniper’s hide over the low, brush-covered flat below. Across the fence was a line of ranchettes—like any river corridor in the mountain west, the lowlands were a snaky line of subdivisions, which the whitetails like to graze through before heading to the high country to sleep their day away. I snapped a bipod into place, laid the rifle next to me and pressed my back up against the cutbank.

While Smith had the deer patterned before we arrived, he couldn’t know the giant white oak just across the wire fence would decide that week to start dropping acorns. As I glassed the brush below, deer would emerge from the neighborhood and beeline for the oak tree to feed. From my perch I couldn’t decide if the tree was fair game on our side of the fence or not, and anyway, it would take some advanced yoga I wasn’t trained for to make the difficult shot at such an acute angle. Luckily, no buck worthy of consideration required such contortions that morning.

That afternoon, from the same perch, I did spy one of the bucks from Smith’s earlier surveillance. After a lifetime of hunting media force-feeding me trophy Midwest whitetails, it took more than a moment to realize what I was looking at. The rack was inside the deer’s ears, but tall and boxy. It was definitely on Smith’s hit list, so I got prone behind my rifle and pulled out my Leupold rangefinding binos. The deer looked like it was standing next to a Himalayan blackberry bramble the size of small bus, though it was hard to tell in the waning light. I ranged the bush at 337 yards, spun the Leupold VX-6 HD’s CDS dial to the appropriate range and slowly squeezed the trigger.

At the shot, the buck bounded into the surrounding Scotch broom, then reappeared on the run before squeezing through a gap in the wire fence and into the black hole of an oak mott. Everything felt solid and I reported to Smith that I thought I had a buck down. Brantley, Moore and I met Smith at the bottom of the hill. There was no blood or other sign of a hit to be found, not where the buck was standing or where it disappeared into the oaks. After re-ranging from the bottom of the hill to my hide I realized the deer had been standing 50 yards closer to me than the blackberries. I’d sailed the round clean over its back.

Doubling Up

After spending the second day of the hunt and the third morning doing my penance with forced marches, Smith sent me back to my original perch. Brantley’s hide was just around a small ridge that dropped right down to the aforementioned oak tree. We wouldn’t be in sight of each other, but were close enough one of us would be able to tag any buck that browsed along the lower fence line.

My early miss had helped me better judge the distance and, now that I had put boots on the ground around the blackberry bramble and Scotch broom below me, I had an idea of how the deer could appear and disappear so easily. A large fold in the terrain created a funnel that, combined with the thick cover, deer could use while remaining hidden from my perch above. A few spots where the cover was thinner provided small openings, so I concentrated my binos on those while the afternoon turned to early evening.

Not long before sunset a pair of antlers appeared in the dense brush. The Scotch broom was so thick it was difficult to make out anything other than the tall, thin set of horns that glowed white in the afternoon light. A few feet away a second deer, then a third and fourth, appeared. It was if they were growing out of the ground as they stood from where they’d likely been bedded since the early morning. Two bucks, the first and another that sported a slightly wider rack, could pass as mature deer, although judging them was still difficult due to their size and my experience with bigger, beefier whitetails.

I deemed the wider buck to be the bigger of the two and readied myself behind the rifle. Taking extra caution to ensure an accurate range, I spun the Leupold CDS dial to 325 yards and, after a deep breath, squeezed the Nosler’s trigger. The buck buckled, ran into some nearby brush and never emerged. I was confident in the shot, but my previous miss left me with some doubts.

While I was glassing the cover, the second mature buck stumbled in synchronicity of a rifle report from Will’s direction. Like my buck, this deer ran into a thick patch of Scotch broom and never reappeared. Standing, I glanced Will’s way. We exchanged thumbs up and, after giving the deer some time, made our way downhill. Both bucks died within a few yards of each other, one laying in the open and the other buried in the blackberries. After handshakes all around, we rushed to capture photos of the deer before the light disappeared. As Moore snapped a few trophy shots I couldn’t help but notice the weight of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity adding some extra mass to the diminutive deer’s princely crown.

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