The other morning I saw O'Neil Outdoors and a guy aged a buck by counting wrinkles at the base of the ear. I learned to age them by dentition and by measuring chest and leg(only locally accurate). I never heard of counting wrinkles. Is this a real method, or is it a 'beer theory'?
Bfly

I've heard this notion as well (in SoTX) but have never compared this to tooth wear (method I generally use, while recognizing its limitations).

Just a note on tooth wear (FWIW) - for it to work best you really need a known age series of jawbones from your local area, and even then, there are enough variables to throw you off once a buck gets much older than 4 1/2 years. This has been confirmed by comparing "dental wear" age estimates to enamel cross sections, which are 100% accurate (but which can't be done in the field).

For example, a buck eating hard mast crops may show more wear than a similar-aged buck eating corn and forbs.

Troy

That's how I learned to do it as well. We did a similar thing with shoulder measurements, but they were even more localized and less sensitive with age. Good for the first three years, then they began to fall apart.
I just never saw anything written up on aging by ear wrinkles. You would have thought somebody could have gotten at least a masters paper out of it, if it worked.
Bfly

Friends-

On the ear wrinkles, I am guessing one needs a pretty decent spotting scope; is this correct.

I have never heard of ear wrinkles and would like to hear more. In MT the fish and shame will take a tooth for aging at the game checks and send them to a lab. This as far as I know is the only way to be accurate at aging deer,

I've just gave this some thought for preshot decision making. I believe that a good spotting scope and a feed box set at the correct angle would help. A slight breeze blowing into the deer's face, so the ear would be extended, but not leading toward you. so the wrinkles would be visible. It might also help if you could blow a low quality grunt call that would cause the deer to give a quizical look to accentuate the wrinkles. I never could get deer to pose for me.
On the show, this guy was counting them after the deer was down.
Bfly

I just learned of this a few weeks ago on a hunt in South Texas.
The hunt took place on a Texas A&M Wildlife Research Ranch and all the deer taken were aged by the resident PhD Wildlife Biologist using the dentition method. Roughly two dozen deer were shot over the weekend and they ranged in age from 2.5 years to 5.5 years.
One of the other hunters present told us of the ear-wrinkle aging method, by which you fold the deer's ear forward and then release it. As the ear moves back into place there are wrinkles present at the base of the front of the ear. Count the wrinkles and that's your deer's age.
Comparing this method to that of the PhD Biologist's method the accuracy was uncanny at about 75%-80%. Even when it was off, it was only by a year one way or the other.
This is not a field-judging method, but rather a post-kill method and it really worked pretty darn well. I will use it in the future.

Would someone be so kind as to post some pictures of this method of aging deer?

Thanks in advance.

What if their ears are pierced, maybe even multiple piercings?

P