Even if it was, there’s not much you could do about it in a free range herd. There may be other contributing factors but genetics didn’t seem to be a significant one. However, given that males rarely engage in serious fights as fawns, and based on data from other studies, Karns concluded that skeletal injury was the most likely cause. Unfortunately, because Karns’ samples only included the head, he was not able to determine if the SOS was a result of skeletal injury or old gunshot wounds. It is fairly common for deer that suffer some type of skeletal injury, particularly to the leg, to have a malformed antler, usually on the opposite side, a phenomenon I’ve encountered on several occasions. Any damage to the pedicel, including antlers that fail to cleanly separate when shed can negatively affect future antler development. Of those, 34 resulted from some type of pedicel or skull trauma (most likely from fighting). Karns was trying to determine whether they reflected inferior genetics, and thus should be considered cull bucks, or there was something else involved.įrom a sample size of 71 SOS bucks, he was able to assign "probable cause" to 44. At the time, Gabriel Karns was exploring the phenomenon of "spike-on-one-side" (SOS or SOOS) bucks at Auburn University. He did not have an answer, but directed me to someone who might. Two deer in two days, each with a spike on one side had to be more than mere coincidence.Īll the same, I passed it off until sometime later when I bumped into Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, & Parks deer biologist William McKinley at a conference and asked him about it. His right antler had three upright points and his left was a single spike. It happens occasionally.įaced with somewhat similar circumstances the next day on another rack buck, this one approaching from my left, I made a similar decision, and a similar discovery. It was not until I later walked up on the deer that I realized its right side was a single spike. An investigation into this phenomenon in whitetail deer.ĭifferent hunts offer different expectations and opportunities and when a modest buck entered my shooting lane after several very slow days of hunting, I quickly saw three upright points on his left beam and made the decision to shoot.
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