Shedding the Rack

“Look at the rack on that one”. Quiet clicking. “Those two are definitely competing for the does in the area”. More clicking. “The king just ran off that smaller buck.” Still more clicking. “I can’t believe how close we are to the king.” I move slowly to hide behind a large clump of exposed aspen tree roots, a few metres away from the magnificent whitetail buck. I have to retract the zoom lens to get enough distance between the deer and my hiding place to get a sharp focus.
Carburn Park, nestled between the Bow River and Calgary’s Riverbend community has been a comfortable home for whitetail deer for decades. In mid-November the competition is fierce between male whitetail deer (bucks) for does in the area. Park users marvel at the intense efforts of older bucks to gather a harem of does, guaranteeing the continuation of their genetic survival. Being in the rut, or peak mating season brings with it a change in buck behavior and physiology. These changes can be attributed to the shortening daylight or photo-period. Bucks experience a rapid increase in testosterone levels, resulting in the swelling of the neck muscles, preparing the buck for combat, rubbing antlers on trees and scraping the ground. For female whitetails, or does, the shortening daylight triggers estrus or going into heat, typically from October to December. The younger the doe, the later it enters estrus, thus contributing to the length of time bucks are not only competitive, but also keep their antlers for combat duty and testosterone levels high.
Once the winter solstice passes, the daylight minutes and hours begin to lengthen. As testosterone levels drop, the phase of shedding antlers moves into gear. Older bucks lose their antlers sooner than younger bucks as they are dominant in the male hierarchy and mate first. Interestingly, as antlers are dead bone, they radiate heat from the head, something a deer doesn’t want to lose during the cold winter season. Other factors aside from age that influence when antlers are shed are health, injury and genetics. In mid-February, Carburn Park bucks were still sporting antlers. By early March, although we counted 13 whitetail deer in the park, we couldn’t find a single deer with even a single antler. That’s right. The antlers on a deer do not fall off at the same time. The photograph provided by Mr. Dominick Gatto, (DomGattoPhoto.com), shows what the top of a deer’s head looks like after the antlers are shed.
A hobby some people do enjoy is antler shed hunting. Whitetail and mule deer would be most common in the Calgary and surrounding area. However moose, caribou and elk sheds are also possibilities where suitable habitat is found. A few key locations to search for sheds are areas where deer bed, feed as well as their travel corridors, or game trails. Sheds I’ve found have been quite by accident, once while scouting out a camping area and the other, while trying to figure out where I was when lost in Alberta’s northwestern boreal forest.
As Felix Salten, author of “Bambi, A Life in the Woods”, put it: “For all the things that live and grow, only the trees and the deer shed their foliage each year and replace it more strongly, more magnificently, in the spring”.