Texas’ deer hunting season looks inviting
When Saturday’s approaching sunrise begins lifting night’s veil from the Texas landscape, the eyes of at least a half-million deer hunters will strain to pick apart the fading shadows.
They will be looking for any slight movement — flick of an ear, tentative step of a long leg — and searching the shadows for the horizontal line of a deer’s back that can give even a stock-still animal away in the mostly vertical world of forest and field.
Those half-million or more of Texas’ 740,000 or so deer hunters expected to be afield on the opening day of the statewide general hunting season for white-tailed deer — the biggest day of hunting participation in Texas — have a very good chance of at least glimpsing their quarry.
Texas’ deer herd is thriving, and so is Texas deer hunting. Population thriving
Texas holds an estimated 4.2 million whitetails, the most by far, of any state. It also holds the most deer hunters. An estimated 739,000 went afield this past year and took almost 721,000 deer, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s annual survey.
Those deer hunters can expect to see good numbers of deer. The whitetail herd still is growing in some areas of the state, Alan Cain, TPWD whitetail deer program leader said.
And thanks to beneficial habitat conditions through most of the year, most of it fueled by abundant and timely rains but also by a mild winter and spring and a less-thanscorching summer, that population likely got a fine boost this summer with average to above-average fawn production and survival.
Those same habitat conditions benefitted adult deer. The deer Texas hunters see this season are likely to be in good to excellent body condition, providing high-quality venison. And the fine crop of favorable forage, especially during the stressful late winter and early spring, allowed bucks to get a running start in their annual replacement of antlers, Cain said. But, he added, a stretch of hot and dry weather that hit parts of Texas, including pockets of the state’s premier whitetail regions, during summer almost certainly affected the final stages of antler development.
“Overall, antler quality this season looks to be average and maybe a little above average in those areas lucky enough to get rains at the right time,” Cain said.
This is of particular interest to Texas’ deer hunters. Those hunters afield this coming opening weekend and the rest of the season, which runs through Jan. 7 in the state’s North Zone and Jan. 21 in the 30-county South Zone, will be focused on those antlers.
Some deer hunters may say — and even sincerely believe — that antlers are not a factor in their deer hunting. They are in the game for the challenge, the chance to use and develop hunting and woodsmanship skills, the opportunity to spend time in the outdoors, share that experience with family and friends, and perhaps be rewarded with a supply of fine, delicious, healthy venison.
“You can’t eat horns,” is a common comment heard on deer leases and hunting camps across the state. And many hunters profess they are just as happy taking a fat doe or pencil-horned spike buck as they would be taking a heavy-antlered buck.
Perhaps so. After all, Texas deer hunters take almost as many antlerless deer as antlered bucks. Last year, when Texans took a record 721,000 deer, the harvest was split almost evenly between antlered and antlerless deer.
But the truth is, there is not a deer hunter out there who doesn’t look for antlers when he or she spots a deer ghosting through the shadows or when one appears, as if by magic, in the middle of what a second before was an empty sendero. A buck’s antlers — their size and characteristics — are qualities imbuing every individual buck with a singularity that sets each one apart from every other buck. No two are alike.
When it comes to antlers, size matters. Bucks with larger antlers — thick beams and long tines and wide spreads — have a cachet that can’t be denied. Regional edge or not?
Texas deer hunters long have chewed on the question of which regions of the state produce the largest-antlered bucks. It is a time-honored topic around fire pits and cabin tables, and can get animated if not downright argumentative.
Do the bucks in South Texas’ brush country just naturally grown larger, heavier, wider antlers than bucks in East Texas’ Piney Woods?
Do the bucks in the deer-rich Edwards Plateau have some genetic quirk that blunts their ability to develop massive sets of antlers?
Does a difference in the nutrients found in the Rolling Plains and the Post Oak Savannah account for the reason the former seems to produce larger bucks than the latter?
Or do the bucks in deer herds across Texas pretty much exhibit the same antler growth, with no area having a regional edge over the others?
Turns out, there is some hard science on the subject. It answers some of those questions.
Each deer season, TPWD wildlife division staff fans out across the state, setting up at deerprocessing businesses and visiting cooperating leases and ranches. The biologists and technicians weigh, age and take antler measurement of the hunters’ harvest, recording the data to use in monitoring the deer population and gauge the effects of hunting regulations and other management programs.
Over the last 12 deer seasons, TPWD staff have aged and taken antler measurements of 30,402 bucks harvested by hunters. The bucks are aged using the tooth-wear method standard for aging whitetails. The antler measurements use the Boone and Crockett Club method — the standard most hunters use to quantify antler size. The measurements are “gross” B&C scores, not the “net” scores that deduct for non-symmetry between a buck’s pair of antlers.
The findings are enlightening. While there are differences in the B&C score of antlers of sameage bucks from the nine ecological regions used by TPWD, those differences are, in most cases, so small as to be insignificant.
As most hunters understand, as bucks age, their antlers tend to grow larger, often peaking somewhere between 5½ and 6½ years, then going downhill as the bucks, which seldom live to 10 years, hit their senior years. (All whitetails are born in summer, so they are halfway through a year during hunting season, thus the half-year ages.)
The study reflects this. The statewide average B&C gross score for 2½-year-old bucks seen in the study is 92.63. The 3½-year-olds averaged 110.04 with 120.13 the average for 4½-year-olds. Bucks 5½ years old or older have an average B&C score of 126.18. (It is difficult to gauge a deer’s exact age by tooth wear patterns after the animals are older than 5 years.)
Some eco-regions beat the average, and some fell below it. And the “winners” might surprise some folks.
In the 3½-year-old category, the highest average antler size was from bucks from the Eastern Rolling Plains region; they averaged 113.68 B&C. East Texas Piney Woods was second with a 112.56 average, and the western Rolling Plains came in third with 112.15.
South Texas 3½-yearolds? They averaged 110.95, just barely above the statewide average.
The Edwards Plateau (101.36) and Trans-Pecos (100.48) had the low-end bucks at 3½ years old.
South Texas topped the 3½-year-old bucks category with an average B&C score of 126.07. The Piney Woods was second with 123.87 and the western Rolling Plains third with 123.69, barely ahead of the eastern Rolling Plain’s 3½-year-old bucks that averaged 123.34.
The low side? Again, the Edwards Plateau and Trans-Pecos drug up the rear with averages of 111.80 and 115.38, respectively.
South Texas also had the highest average B&C scores for bucks in the 5½-year-old-and-older category. The bucks from the famed “brush country” had an average B&C gross score of 134.41.
The western Rolling Plains ranked just behind South Texas with an average score of 132.55.
In what might — certainly will —surprise many deer hunters, the Blackland Prairies region of east Central Texas had the third-highest average for 5.5 and older bucks — 131.60.
Again, the Edwards Plateau, the most deerrich region of Texas, had the lowest average antler size for 5½-year-old buck with 118.39. The TransPecos was second lowest with 120.21. Differences are small
Hunters can take from that data what they will, making arguments that bucks from some regions outshine those of others. But the differences between the highest ranking and the lowest are mostly a matter of a few inches of antler.
Truth is, the quality and quantity of a buck’s antlers depends on a mix of factors. Genetics play a role. But so does age and especially quality of habitat. Bucks that get plenty of high-quality nutrition, especially during the crucial early spring season when antler development begins, stand the best chance to reach their best antler potential.
This Texas deer season, that potential looks to be average or maybe a little better than average. And in Texas, even an average deer season is something special. More than 700,000 Texas hunter get to see just how special beginning this Saturday.