I was running the dog yesterday afternoon up on Nose Hill in Calgary and ran into an antlered whitetail at about 60m. Good rack for a youngish deer, bleached bone white like a shed that had lain out over the winter. The buck was skinnier than the does he was with, but looked healthy enough. Am I wrong in thinking that a deer with antlers in May is odd? I have a huge shed that I picked off my grandfather's farm on Boxing Day and thought that mid winter was the normal time for deer to shed their antlers.

Dean

I would think that the deer you seen just hasn't dropped his antlers yet. They usually still have velvet in august/september

I realise that these were last year's antlers. I just had expected that they would have been dropped months ago.

Dean

Yo, Dean ! I saw a mulie buck the other day with about six inches of new antler ... so I would have to agree that still having antlers now is rather unusual ..

quote:

Originally posted by scruffy:
Yo, Dean ! I saw a mulie buck the other day with about six inches of new antler ... so I would have to agree that still having antlers now is rather unusual ..

Same here in MB, saw 3 bucks last week after work, all 3 had new antler growth...perhaps this is a hermaphroditic deer that has horns all year long for it's whole life...it's happened before

quote:

Originally posted by CoyoteKiller82:

quote:

Originally posted by scruffy:
Yo, Dean ! I saw a mulie buck the other day with about six inches of new antler ... so I would have to agree that still having antlers now is rather unusual ..

Same here in MB, saw 3 bucks last week after work, all 3 had new antler growth...perhaps this is a hermaphroditic deer that has horns all year long for it's whole life...it's happened before

Doubt it is a hermaphrodite, this couldn't have been its first set of antlers. A nice high and wide 5x5 rack maybe lacking a bit of mass to be called really good. Maybe not a first morning buck, but certainly a first evening buck by my standards. I've been going through my favourite deer reference looking for biological reasons for not dropping antlers and haven't found it yet. Haven't seen the deer again either.

Dean

Any one have a copy of this book?

Goss, R. J. 1983. Deer antlers: regeneration, function and evolution. Academic Press, New York.

A statement in the Whitehead Encyclopedia of Deer that some Asian deer and occasionally whitetails may keep a set of antlers for a year or two comes with a reference to Goss, 1983. No other info is given. I'm interested in what the cause might be, but not enough to cough up the $363 plus shipping that it would take to get a copy off Amazon.

The things that seem important when there is no hunting to be had .

Dean