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Near and Deer: East Grand Forks Students get Up-Close Look at Trophy Whitetail Bucks

Brad Dokken Grand Forks Herald

Steve Porter had a simple message Tuesday for seventh-graders at Central Middle School in East Grand Forks: Young people who get involved in the outdoors are less apt to get into trouble. “Typically, kids involved in hunting, fishing, trapping and the outdoors aren’t vandalizing pop machines at 3 in the morning,” Porter said.

Porter, owner of Porter’s Trophy Whitetails, Lake Bronson, Minn., and his son, Dillan, brought the family’s traveling display of live trophy bucks to seventh-grade life science students for a daylong series of lectures on whitetail behavior and genetics. For the students, Porter’s visit was an opportunity to experience science up close and personal instead of reading about it in a book. And according to Allen Edman, who teaches life science at the middle school, that’s exactly the point. “Anything that can get them interested in the outdoors,” Edman said. “I believe in doing science instead of talking about it. This is about as hands-on as you can get.”

Porter’s stop Tuesday in East Grand Forks was No. 23 in a 25-school swing across Minnesota that began in mid-September. The North American Deer Farmers Association, based in Lake City, Minn., and the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association funded the bulk of the tour, with local sporting goods clubs picking up the slack in some communities. The Min-Dak Border Chapter of the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association helped fund Porter’s stop in East Grand Forks, which also included a Tuesday night presentation for the chapter’s annual fall membership meeting. Porter, who is chief deputy for the Kittson County (Minn.) Sheriff’s Department, said he’s taken vacation time to make the tour. He’s brought his traveling whitetail display to schools in the past, but never on such a large scale.

“We’ve had a lot of positive response,” he said. “I’ve had e-mails from kids saying, ‘Steve, I’m excited to hunt,’ so we’re getting a lot of feedback from kids. When you think about the magnitude of what we’re doing, it’s huge — bringing live whitetail bucks to schools to promote hunting.”

The stars of the show on this brisk fall day were Redwood, Thor and Shifty, three whitetail bucks ranging in age from 2½ to 6½ years old. Big, impressive animals all of them, the bucks sported racks that would get any deer hunter’s heart pumping.

Porter transports the bucks in a custom-made trailer with separate stalls for each deer. With the cooler temperatures this time of year, the deer travel well as long as their bellies are full, he said. But with mating season approaching, they have to be kept separated in such close quarters to avoid fights.

On Tuesday, Porter had the trailer parked on the east side of the middle school, and five sessions of Edman’s life science class spent the period outdoors learning about whitetail biology from a man who’s made it his life’s passion to study the animals since he started raising them more than a decade ago. Porter covered a lot of ground, explaining why bucks become so aggressive in the fall and teaching students how to tell the difference between the antlers of bucks ages 1½, 2½ and 3½ or older. Some of what he’s learned, he admitted, came from the school of hard knocks, such as the time a rutting buck attacked when Porter started a chain saw inside the pen. It might have sounded like a chain saw to human ears, Porter said, but the buck heard the sound of a rival.

“A whitetail buck always wants to be No. 1,” Porter said. “To him, I’m just another tall deer.” Porter also explained how whitetail biology fits into hunting strategies. Only a handful of the 30 students attending his presentation after lunch Tuesday said they’d hunted deer, but it didn’t appear to diminish their interest. As a deputy, Porter speaks from experience when he talks about the benefits of getting young people involved in the outdoors. “Anything we can do to spark an interest” is good, he said. “The more knowledge we can give them about deer, the more likely we’re going to spark an interest to want to get out there. “I think it’s a win-win deal.”

Edman said he’ll be able to work Porter’s lecture into classroom discussions about genetics. Later this fall, some of his students will help the local MDHA chapter prepare deer hides for its annual Hides for Habitat campaign.

On the Web: www.porterwhitetail.com.

Dokken reports on outdoors. Reach him at (701) 780-1148; (800) 477-6572, ext. 148; or send e-mail to bdokken@gfherald.com.