Wednesday, August 6, 2014

The Buck Stops Here-Part Two-Antler Growth


 
                                 

As promised in the last blog- let’s talk facts and fiction in the antler world.

Fact: A bucks antlers are the fastest growing tissue in the animal kingdom!  At the peak of their growth they can add ½” a day.

Fiction: You can tell the age of a buck by the number of points on its antlers. 
No, the size of the rack tells you more about the nutrition of the animal; whether it weathered a hard winter or not.  The better the diet; the larger the rack.

To accurately age a deer, you would take a slice of its tooth (something a live deer is not going to be up for!) and have an expert count the “rings”, it’s annual growth, under a microscope. 

Fact: The velvet that covers the antlers as they grow through spring and summer is skin that is rich with blood vessels.  When testosterone begins to increase at the end of summer, it is a signal for the blood flow to stop. The antlers, which are bone, start to harden and the “velvet” is rubbed off.
 
Fiction:  Once the velvet is rubbed off, they will stop scraping your trees. NOT!  They continue to rub their antlers against the trees to help strengthen their neck muscles for the upcoming territorial challenges.  My poor trees always look like they have been through a war by falls end but so far it hasn’t out and out killed them.
 
Fact: Bucks must be careful of their antlers in summer during their growth. Any hard bumps could leave them deformed for the rest of that year to say nothing of the possibility of bleeding.  Tip toeing through the junipers must be their summer gait.

Fact: A really well fed, young buck, like the ones in our neighborhood, can sport a decent rack even before their 4th birthday.  Deer continue to grow until they are 4 so most of their nutrition goes into gaining skeletal mass. However, if you live in an area where we all fall prey to those liquid eyes, then the young stud gets extra calories to grow some decent antlers.

Fact: If you find a deer skull where the deer died “with his antlers off,” rather than “with his boots on”, you can still tell male from female.  The male skull has bony outgrowths called pedicels that the antler grows out from and a doe skull won’t have these.  If you want to be “uber” nature detective; the larger the pedicles the larger the antlers and, until it died, it was a well-fed deer.

Fact: Antlers are shed between Dec-March with the healthiest deer shedding their antlers later in the season.

Fiction: The terms horns and antlers are interchangeable.  No, a horn is bone that is a growing part of the animal’s body (think cows, rhinoceros, antelope etc) and is never shed whereas the antlers are shed once a year.

Fact: We have heard enough facts Pat! Let us get on with our lives! 

OK, me too. I leave in 36 hrs for a 5-week sojourn to the Northeast.  The one-legged- naturalist gimps north to her ancestral hunting grounds!  In true, pick-the-worst-possible time-to-die form, my computer expired last weekend.  I am thankful for a very old Apple that is doing it’s best, but if these blogs fall off for a while you will know why.

Wishing you all the best in this waning summer. Hopefully I will find a way to blog from the road. There will be much beauty to be seen, dear friends to be met and a family all together, to explore Ann of Avonlea land. What could be grander?


2 comments:

  1. Once again I learned a whole lot about deer. I erroneously thought the deer's age was related to the points. Now I know the rack size is determined by nutrition. No wonder those deer in the corn fields look so big with the huge racks. Thanks for your hard work preparing these interesting blogs. JKJ

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pat, I too learned some fiction I had heard differs from fact...good things to know. Thank you! Praying for Traveling Mercies for you on the road and as you visit family and friends. Hope you can send us some photographs of the beautiful East Coast. jep

    ReplyDelete