The Injuries and Illnesses that Trigger Amazing Antlers

Just as premier wines come from the grapes of stressed vines, cool antlers with great character often come from bucks who suffered broken bones, harsh diseases, or crippling injuries. As Demi Lovato sings, “Nothing is more beautiful than the smile that struggled through tears.” Admirable antler traits are subjective, of course, and vary by admirer. Still, most hunters find charm in the bowls, furrows, sharp angles, palmations, flat edges, and...

The Buck That Never Shed Its Antlers

This summer I was tipped off that a hunter in northern Iowa had a hard-horned buck at his farm on the Fourth of July. Accompanying the message was a trail camera picture dated appropriately, showing a velvet buck and a hard-horned buck at the same mineral pile. I was skeptical, so I tracked down the owner of the pictures to see what he could tell me. “This buck was one of the first pictures I had on camera this summer,” said Aaron Anderson of...

Why Do Female Deer Sometimes Grow Antlers?

We’d been sitting in the aspen stand for hours, glassing the same distant seam of sagebrush-pine transition, waiting for a group of whitetails to creep out into the open. As the light began to fade, three slowly appeared from behind the trees: one yearling; one young, skinny doe; and one small deer with a single spike antler. It became pretty obvious that my dad and I weren’t going to notch our antlerless tags that night. The sun continued to...