Big Game Means Big Business: Scientific breeding yields big bucks at Dead Man's Pass

January 28, 2007
By Bill Sontag
Feature Writer

“Let’s face it. In Texas, it’s really the horns. It’s all about the horns,” asserted Ross DeVries, ranch manager at Dead Man’s Pass Ranch, Sunday (Dec. 31, 2006). But for DeVries and his boss, proprietor Michael McGee, the 2,300-acre spread north of Comstock is an entrepreneurial blend of science, wildlife management and personal dedication.

The focus of DeVries’ days, often starting before dawn and extending long into the night, is continuous improvement of herds of trophy white-tailed deer and American elk. And that means habitat improvement: Enriching the quality and diversity of natural food sources, providing water where it’s scarce, enhancing cover and protection against unrelenting sun and predators.

Dead Man’s Pass Ranch has been in McGee’s ownership, with his wife Jeanne, since September, 2000, and he and DeVries have transformed both the appearance and the natural character of the place. Once owned by ranchers Fred and Frankie Lee Harlow, Dead Man’s Pass was dotted with herds of sheep and goats with vastly different habitat requirements from trophy deer.

McGee, a Katy, Texas, investment insurance consultant, has visited Val Verde County off-and-on since 1976, and witnessed the growth of ranching aimed at satisfying demands of big-city hunters. He jumped in just as the lucrative sheen of livestock ranching began to tarnish, blamed on foreign imports, government subsidy reductions, changing consumer demands, estate taxes, and falling prices.

Over the years, McGee noticed an influx of wealthy hunters from Houston and San Antonio. “Now,” DeVries said, “they come from anyplace east. Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma. Texas, in general, is known for its bigger deer.” The two men are determined to make their deer even bigger.

While extraordinary length, tine count, and girth of antlers are highly sought-after by trophy hunters, weight and robust health are important to meat hunters. But DeVries’ job is to balance those desires, while keeping track of his deer to find out which ones need to be targeted for managerial improvement of the whole population. So Dead Man’s Pass Ranch offers white-tailed deer hunters “Meat, Management & Trophy” hunts.

To hasten the achievement of highest quality herds with potential to produce trophy-sized deer, McGee had an eight-foot-high fence built around the entire 3.5-square-mile ranch. Before completion, McGee said, “We ran all the deer off the place.” The fence serves to keep carefully selected and bred deer with pedigree-style records for trophy lineage on the ranch, and to prevent cross-breeding with native deer of unknown performance.

McGee purchased breeder bucks and does from other ranches specializing in trophy herd development, and now operates his own breeding program. DeVries explained, “We hold a scientific breeders license here now,” adding that champion bucks and does yield fawns that are bottle-fed in small pens until mature enough for release into ¾- or one-acre pens, the last step for transition release to the ranch’s open terrain.

McGee said the breeders are shamelessly pampered. “You want to come back in a later life as a breeder buck here,” McGee quipped. “It’s like being in a room with 14 or 15 females, with a TV, and a cigarette break when you need it. And all we ask you to do is one thing.”

McGee will have his way when the diversity of his West Texas oasis is maximized. Dead Man’s Pass Ranch also boasts upland game bird hunting, including bobwhite quail and turkey, and the ranch is fitted with raising pens for birds, and runs of pedigreed pointers to find and mark their location afield.

McGee, 51, was born in Anchorage, Alaska, lived into his teens in Ohio, then moved to San Antonio, and finally settled in the Houston area. A University of Houston accounting graduate, McGee started his academic career in petroleum engineering, a convenient duality in Houston’s energy industry economy. But his concentration here is on nourishing a renewable resource, rather than extraction of irreplaceable mineral deposits.

Toward that end, McGee and DeVries launched an aggressive program of habitat manipulation and management to ensure the success of the ranch’s reputation for trophy deer and elk. The ranch is mantled over five limestone ridge prominences and the hollows between, and nowhere is water more important to herds of deer and flocks of gamebirds than on this arid land.

Water from four deep wells is piped in 43,000 feet of flexible tubing to 25 water troughs and eight dirt-tank watering holes, scattered strategically around the ranch. “We didn’t want property that had running water,” McGee said, explaining that flowing river and stream courses tend to concentrate wildlife where water is most abundant, rather than encouraging broad distribution.

However, lakes of water and frequent rainstorms wouldn’t create the food source sufficient to nourish the trophy animals hunters crave. Supplemental feeding facilitates health and antler growth, and McGee annually invests in 170 tons of 20 percent pure protein pellets to be distributed from “free choice” feeders scattered around Dead Man’s Pass Ranch.

To boot, ranch deer and elk are treated to truckloads of alfalfa, shipped in from fields in New Mexico and near Hondo, Texas. Rounding out the feeding program, corn and milo, a sorghum grain from crops across North Texas and the Midwest, are stocked in feeders around the ranch.

“And we de-worm three times a year,” DeVries added, describing feed corn soaked in wormicides placed around the ranch at feeding stations.

Results of the efforts gratify McGee and DeVries. To date, the largest white-tailed buck taken weighed in at 240 pounds, and the smallest at a healthy 160 pounds, each from a herd now numbering about 500.

Their elk management program is young, and most of the bulls have not reached sexual maturity, registered in “headgear” growth of six tines (points) on each antler beam. McGee and DeVries hope for seven- and eight-point beams, and are reluctant to allow hunting of “lesser” bulls until that level of herd maturity is reached. Herd size is only 32, but it began with just one bull and five cows.

To date, the best elk bull taken was a 1,300-pound animal with six tines on one beam, seven on the other in 2005. “This is only our second year to hunt elk, and we need at least three more years to develop a mature, huntable population,” DeVries said.

In addition, Dead Man’s Pass Ranch participates in a Texas Parks & Wildlife Department (TP&WD) program aimed at further improving the state’s habitat for wildlife, and game in particular. The Managed Lands Deer (MLD) permit program allows the ranch to issue permits for bigger bag limits and extended seasons if the property qualifies within stringent parameters, according to TP&WD Wildlife Biologist Sylvestre Sorola, Monday (Jan. 1, 2007).

Sorola speaks highly of the Dead Man’s Pass Ranch program. “This program (MLD) is good for people under intensive deer management programs. Their habitat is usually better than others, and they also usually feed high protein feed as a supplement. Therefore they have higher fawn survivorship than most folks do.

“But their populations can get out of hand if they don’t harvest their herds more intensively,” Sorola said. This is reference to the MLD Program authorization for participating farms and ranches to feature much-extended seasons, beyond the normal deer hunting seasons (November 3 through January 15) elsewhere. Dead Man’s Pass is authorized to allow white-tailed deer hunts October 1 through February 28.

DeVries explained that the longer season permits greater harvest of herds that are rapidly expanding due to feeding programs and habitat enrichment. At the same time, longer seasons permit selective thinning of herds to promote the genetic best-of-the-best. Sorola said he monitors program participants closely, looking for satisfaction of requirements for extensive data collection and demonstrated habitat improvement. “It’s really all based on the habitat, and helps us decide the legacy we’re going to leave for future generations,” Sorola said.

Customer service and herd protection are twin, if sometimes opposing goals of every hunter’s visit. “Everybody hunts from a stand, and no one hunts from a vehicle,” said McGee. “Safety is our primary goal.”

“And all our hunts are guided,” said DeVries. He serves as guide, but speaks highly of guides Robert Martinez, a Del Rio taxidermist, Michael Joffrion, insurance agent, Alan Joiner, CITGO economist, and Craig Alexander, Laughlin Air Force Base firefighter.

McGee hosts about 300 guests a year, hunting, fishing on Lake Amistad, or just on weekend “get-aways” with friends or families. He touts the wide range of leisure time activities that are afforded all guests, but stresses the business class of visitors he sees most often.

“You want to create an environment that is family-oriented. But we also find this is a great environment to host businessmen and women, and to hold business meetings. Everything in business is about relationships,” McGee said.

For more information, look at the Dead Man’s Pass Web site, www.deadmanspassranch.com .