I am here again to sing the praises of the best kind of deer – those WITHOUT antlers. I have never been shy about my love for does. They are the smartest, prettiest, most important segment of the deer population. They have been undervalued and underappreciated since the dawn of deer management.
Do you know how much antlered harvest matters in deer management? It doesn’t. That’s why anybody who buys a hunting license can kill one if they choose. Females are where it’s at when it comes to deer management – not yearling bucks or adult bucks or fawns. Fawns are super cute though. It’s female survival that moves the population needle up or down. Yet deer managers have spent an exorbitant amount of time and effort to “give the people what they want” – in this case, big antlers. Some have gone so far as to put deer behind a fence for the sole purpose of creating giant antlers.
A colleague once wrote, “If we can turn a wolf into a Chihuahua, no one had to convince me that some clever person could genetically engineer the super buck… the fact is that no other genetic characteristic will matter as long as the antlers are gigantic.”
Breeding captive deer for freakishly large antlers is an extreme example but there are many that manage their properties with the intent of producing large antlered bucks.
I recently came across a paper titled “Correlating male white-tailed deer antler size with female body mass across multiple spatial scales” and got very excited. Because I thought it was finally the research I had been waiting for linking the female contribution to antler size. Alas, it was not.
Instead, it was about equating an alternative metric to gauge the one metric everyone is obsessed with – antler size. I was very disappointed.
Because antler size is based on age, nutrition, and genetics, and only 2 of those things can be manipulated in free-ranging deer, managers focus on improving habitat and increasing the age structure of males. Limiting buck harvest will increase the age structure. Improving habitat can mean many things but one method is to balance the deer herd with habitat that is already available. How might you do that? That’s right – harvest does.
If you have limited buck harvest and antler size is dependent on age at harvest, how do you know if your efforts are moving you closer to your goal of bigger antlers? (It hurts me even to type that.)
Weigh your harvested does. Because, as usual, they have the answer to all life’s mysteries. Researchers used data from 31 properties across the eastern United States and found that a 1-kg increase in average adult female body mass predicted a 4.4 cm increase in average mature male antler size.
Another reason to pay attention to doe harvest and to question antlers and their place in society and deer management.
-Jeannine Fleegle
Wildlife Biologist
PA Game Commission
