Our friend Wren sent these pictures of a great and unique buck shot in Texas last season. “The common base is just huge!” Wren said. What caused that one massive base? Had he lived, could the buck possibly shed this mass? I asked Kip Adams, wildlife biologist and Chief Conservation Officer for the National Deer Association. Kip says: Science has shown that you can move growing antler tissue to other parts of the body and grow an antler in a different place (other than a deer’s head). Research has done this on a deer’s leg and even a mouse’s forehead.  I’m guessing this buck was injured early in the antler growing process last year, and some of those antler cells [...]

Hey Mike: It was an easy winter on whitetails this year in NE North Dakota. We had very little snow and only about 1 week with really cold temperatures. The deer should be in good health. I got this picture of a buck still holding his antlers on April 10th! Does that seem abnormally late? What is the latest you have heard of whitetails dropping their sheds this far north? I figured it was possible considering the mild winter. Other ideas that crossed my mind were, is this an antlered doe? But usually, antlered does remain in velvet. Or maybe this was a buck who got injured or otherwise had low testosterone?--Derek Plautz Derek, thanks for checking in. I believe [...]

The Deer Lab at Auburn University has a 430-acre high-fenced facility. All the deer inside the fence are well known and documented. During the 7-year-period from 2012 to 2018, biologists and grad students were inside the facility daily, working, doing research, taking samples and looking around. They found only 284 of 747 (39%) of antlers they knew were shed by the bucks during that period. They analyzed the antlers they found, and determined from their records and data that the average age of the bucks that cast them was 5½ years. For the antlers that were never found, the average age of the bucks was 3½. Bottom line: The larger antlers of older bucks are easiest to see and pick [...]