‘I was nervous’: Video shows Kansas game warden shooting to free entangled bucks

Kansas game warden Colter Silhan felt extra pressure as he attempted to shoot loose a couple of bucks that had gotten tangled together while fighting.

The 26-year-old had been called to free them Monday in Dickinson County. One of the bucks had died. He figured they had been tangled together a few days.

He had an audience — a landowner, a person he thought was a nearby homeowner and the hunter who called in the incident — as he tried to do something he had never done. He had seen video of other game wardens freeing tangled bucks by throwing a blanket over their eyes and then shooting the antlers with a pistol or even lassoing them to a tree and then sawing off the antlers.

“There is no right or wrong way to do it as long as you get it done,” he said. “I was going to get them separated one way or another. I was nervous. There was three people out there watching me.”

Silhan, a Salina resident who had been a park ranger for 3.5 years before becoming a game warden in January, thought his best bet was to use a slug from his shotgun.

The body cam video shows him wait and wait until the live deer turns broadside. He then fires a shot. The bucks still appeared tangled as he loads another round, but then the buck breaks free and runs off.

“That worked out pretty good,” he said in the video.

The shot knocked off the left antlers on the surviving buck and some of the tines on the dead one, Silhan said.

Silhan thinks the dead buck had broken his neck during the fracas. The back legs of the dead buck had been chewed, likely by coyotes.

“So you can imagine what that other one had to go through,” he said Wednesday morning after bow hunting earlier that day for deer on his family farm in Sumner County. “So, definitely, I think shooting the rack put it through some stress but I think saved it in the long run from being eaten alive by coyotes.”

A salvage tag was given to the hunter who called law enforcement about the tangled bucks.

He said the surviving deer will “have a story to tell of his buddies.”

Bucks will often fight for the right to breed does in late October and November. It’s not unheard of for their racks to get stuck together.