Last deer season 2 hunters shot 2 rare and incredibly beautiful white whitetails. One day in October 2014 11-year-old Gavin Dingman shot a 12-point buck with a crossbow. Another day fellow Virginia hunter Daniel Blaha shot this 8-pointer, which is without question the most stunning piebald buck I have ever seen. Just how rare are white deer like this? According to Wisconsin naturalist John Bates, co-author of "White Deer: Ghosts of the Forest," a true albino occurs in about one in 20,000 fawn births. Other biologists say they are much rarer, with only one in 100,000 deer born totally white. As for the genetic variation that causes the brown-and-white piebald, biologists say that less than 1% of all whitetails born will [...]

Hot off the press, the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State reports: Based on bucks wearing GPS radio collars during the 2013 rut, buck movements declined through the early morning. From 8AM to 11AM, bucks moved the least during that period of the day. But you better be in the woods and ready by 11:00 as  buck movements increased to some of their highest levels from 11AM to 2PM. The (chart) above shows movements of bucks wearing GPS radio-collars from November 1st to 10th (early November) and November 11th to 20th (mid-November). The distances bucks moved are in 3-hour periods. Peak buck movements were from 2 to 5AM and from 11AM to 2PM. This further confirms what I have [...]

For his graduate research project at Auburn, deer researcher Clint McCoy tracked the movements of 37 GPS-collared bucks on a 6,400-acre hunting site with excellent habitat in South Carolina. Read the full story at QDMA.com; here are a few highlights with my observations: Clint found average fall home range size for a buck was 350 acres. A buck’s age did not seem to play a role in how far he moved. “Our two smallest home ranges were yearling bucks at 60 and 90 acres. Our two largest home ranges of 754 and 640 acres were also yearling bucks.” This seems to contradict some earlier studies which found that older bucks have the smallest home ranges of all bucks. But this [...]

This is a picture of the Mini-Beast Buck last night, which means he stripped the velvet clean off his rack one day last week in late August. The bottom picture is of Mini-Beast with growing velvet antlers in July. The best description of the velvet-shedding ritual I have ever read comes from the research book Way of the Whitetail by Leonard Lee Rue III: Usually in the last week of August and the first week of September, the bucks begin to peel the velvet from their antlers. Mature bucks often peel four to five days earlier than the younger bucks, but I have seen younger bucks peel first on many occasions. Whereas up to this point the bucks have done everything possible [...]