Rare antlered doe found near San Antonio
Gene and Debbie Ray noticed something unusual the first time they spied the scraggly six-pointer two years ago at their hunting lease near Spring Branch, about 30 miles from San Antonio.
The white-tailed deer’s antlers stayed in velvet throughout last season and they never fell off like most do beginning in January.
“The horns just kept getting bigger and bigger,” Ray said.
By glassing and studying game camera images, the Floresville residents failed to see any signs of a scrotum.
The Rays figured the deer suffered from cryptorchidism, an uncommon condition where a buck’s testicles do not drop and reduced testosterone levels cause the antlers to not fall off and to stay in velvet, the soft skin that covers the rack while it grows until the antlers harden in September.
Two weeks before opening day on Nov. 2, the antlers still were in velvet.
By the morning of the first day of the season, though, the velvet was gone.
“We decided it was a cull deer and needed to be eliminated,” Ray said.
Debbie Ray took aim and dropped it with a perfect heart shot.
“She has to have cataract surgery in December,” he said. “Luckily the deer was about 70 yards away instead of 100 or she wouldn’t have been able to see it.”
When the Rays went to fetch the deer, he turned it on its back.
“I was anticipating seeing some equipment there. I was really shocked,” Ray said.
It had female genitals. The “buck” was a doe with antlers, an extremely rare occurrence in the white-tailed deer world.
“I’ve been hunting since I was a little boy and have never seen anything like it. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” said Ray, 62, control room operator at CPS Energy’s Leon Creek Power Plant.
Debbie Ray, whom her husband describes as modest, declined to be interviewed.
One quandary they faced concerned which tag to use — buck or antlerless, which includes does.
The ranch manager called a game warden, who said it needed to be a buck tag because once the carcass was quartered, the only evidence of sex would be the antlers.
During his 20 years with the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, white-tailed deer program leader Alan Cain has only heard of five antlered does including this one among the hundreds of thousands of harvested bucks the staff sees each year.
“They hit the internet pretty quickly so everybody knows about them,” Cain said. “Essentially they’re genetic anomalies. They’re rare.
“Chalk it up to something unusual and different. It sure makes for a great story for a hunter to tell.”
Cain does not know of anyone doing studies of antlered does because they are so rare.
A 2001 article on antlered does in Montana’s Billings Gazette cites three studies that Leonard Lee Rue wrote about in his book, “The Deer of North America,” Crown Publishers (1978):
One in 18,000 antlered deer in Pennsylvania is a doe.
One of 2,500-2,700 does grows antlers in New York.
Of about 1,500 does killed every season in Fulton County, Ill., one to three have antlers.
Cain urges any hunter who bags a doe with antlers to contact him or their local TPWD biologist.
“Not that we’re going to do a lot with it, but it would help us, landowners and hunters in our understanding of deer biology out there,” he said.
Some if the information needed includes where it was killed, antler and body measurements, sex organs and photos.
The general consensus among wildlife biologists is that conditions that produce antlered does fall into three categories.
A true antlered doe is a female that produces too much testosterone and develops such buck characteristics as antlers. Just as in humans, testosterone is for men and estrogen is for women. But both sexes also produce small amounts of the primary hormone of the opposite sex.
Some can reproduce while others cannot.
A hermaphrodite is the result of a genetic defect and possesses male and female reproductive organs. They can be internal or external or in various combinations.
A pseudo-hermaphrodite can have internal reproductive organs of one sex and the externals of another.
It’s so complicated that a necropsy is often the only way to determine what’s what.
Regardless of the type of freak the Rays’ antlered doe is, they are getting a shoulder mount of it.
They took it to Tyler Vanderkolk of Animal Art Taxidermy in Austin, who said it will be only the second such mount in his 19 years as a taxidermist.
“There are a lot of customers looking at it. At first, people don’t really know what it is and just say it’s a crappy whitetail,” Vanderkolk said. “Then I tell them hold on — there’s more to the story.”
While he has not figured out exactly what he will do with the mount, Vanderkolk said he will have to buy a doe form because the necks of buck forms are not as small as the Rays’ doe.
Ray said the doe weighed 129 pounds, which is on the high side of an average Hill Country doe. He aged it at 3½ years.
“Gene had been telling me about it, but until I actually saw it up close it’s hard to believe,” Vanderkolk said. “When I saw it I said man that is crazy.
“I’ll probably end up putting a little plaque under it with a description and their names.”
Ray said they never saw her with a fawn and that she showed no signs of lactation.
“It’s no 20-inch spread, but it’s a trophy,” he said. “You can spend $10,000 or $20,000 and kill a big deer, but you can’t buy something like this.
“It’s the luck of the draw.”