264Magic wrote on Jul 3^rd, 2014 at 9:16am:

+ 1 for me also, but what would I know about trophy hunting/scoring? I'm from the shoot-n-sell era. 
Pongo, bloody nice looking  head, the fallow, not you. 

I'm amazed it took me so long to see that post. Getting old.   You have a world class buck there pongo.  Hearty congratulations.  I'd put money on "northern part of the herd".  I measured another Wanganui buck (this year's) a couple of weeks back.
DS241.7!   Your buck is bigger.
As to "overspread". The Douglas principal ,spread factor is based upon what is normal for the species. There is plenty evidence that the normal MATURE fallow buck tends to be several inches more spread than the antler length.  So the extra spread allowance for fallow is proper.

Told you so.  This time last year (reply 27) I posted pics of a Common buck as a 3yr old and then as a very promising 4 yr old.  And incidently I lost that head because the two same age bucks had one humungous fight and all four antlers lay on the ground!  Ok, now they are just completing their velvet growth as 5 yr olds and both are wallhangers well above DS200. I'll post the pic of the Common for comparative purposes, but I forgot to put on photobucket.  See ya soon.

Grandad wrote on Feb 4^th, 2015 at 8:07am:


that is some fight!
hes really starting to get some nice shape to him now Grandad, imaging him at 7 or 8!

The whole point to this thread was to illustrate to our members that many of the fallow bucks that are being shot are only youngsters. So it's pretty stupid to moan about "rubbish head", "split palms".  Just let the bucks grow to six or seven years old.  Here's a good example of a wild Wairarapa buck I measured this year.  I considered him to be 7 yrs old. Douglas score was 251.7 :