Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Angling for antlers in the deer woods
Our late archery season here in our neck of Penn’s Woods stretched all the way through January 28. I was in my tree stand when the final hours of that season expired to find myself with my buck tag still unfilled. Sure, I had plenty of opportunities to bag a number of young bucks with inferior racks, but I was holding out for a nice trophy buck whose images I’d captured on my trail camera. The eight-point was hanging out in our neighborhood so I figured I’d cross paths with him sooner or later.
And I did, but it was too much later and by the time he sashayed within range of my stand in mid-January he was sporting a very different look, namely, he was now an antlerless deer, having shed his antlers at least a few days prior to that encounter. Bucks typically begin to shed their antlers in late January into March, dropping off their headgear in random locations throughout the deer woods. Unfortunately, when it came to the process of shedding antlers, my buck was an early bird.
As I hunted those last two weeks in January, I spotted at least three hefty bucks that had already shed both their antlers and a few unicorns that had shed just one. There was also a spindly five-point buck that stubbornly held on to both halves of his rack. Having held out for so long, I was not about to settle for that or any other young little buck, but observing that his big brothers had already gone bald, my hopes of collecting any mature buck that still had antlers were fading fast.
Then, on January 25, I watched as two bucks slowly made their way down the hillside toward my stand. For a few moments they paused to spar and clicked their antlers a few times. One was a smallish six-point, but the other was a tremendous ten-pointer, a deer I had never seen before, with both antlers still intact. This was the biggest deer I had en
countered that season, so I readied myself to take a shot.
But Mr. Big hadn’t survived that long by being stupid, and at a range of forty yards, he seemed to sense trouble and changed direction, yet still offered me a chancy crossbow shot. But my attempt (the only arrow I would launch that year) was ill advised as the arrow glanced off some brush and buried itself harmlessly into the ground as the unscathed ten-point and his friends scrambled back over the hill, white flags flying. Of course, I immediately began second guessing myself, realizing that maybe if I hadn’t forced that iffy shot and spooked that buck into the next county, I just might have earned a second chance at him in the waning days that remained in the season.
One unwritten rule of deer hunting is that any shot taken must be followed up, even if that shot is obviously errant. I did just that, and trudged uphill until I came across the arrow, unbloodied and buried deep into the forest floor. As suspected, a clean miss. But on that uphill trek to retrieve my arrow I also found something else: a freshly shed antler, and one that looked mighty familiar.
Yep, against all odds it was a shed from the eightpoint I had been chasing all season. I compared it to the trail camera images and there could be no doubt — it was definitely the left antler of that same buck. After I hunted the last two days of the season, came up empty, and the season ended, I determined to scour the woodlot to see if I could find that shed antler’s right sided match. My wife Patti provided assistance as we searched the hillside for disembodied antlers. It didn’t take long for her to locate another shed, not the match of my find but from an eight-point that might have been dropped the year before.
Another hour of searching yielded one more shed, the right side of what had likely been a fine ten-point buck. The shed had five points but was so chewed up and gnawed by rodents in quest of calcium it had likely been shed at least a year earlier — maybe even two or three.
And despite a few more forays into the woodlot, I still haven’t found the match to my photogenic eight-point’s shed, but I’ll keep trying. A month from now other bucks will have all shed their antlers. Rest assured I’ll be on the lookout for them, you should be too.