Spring 2006

''Lost and Found'' In the Woods

By DENNIS WALROD
(Excerpted from: Antlers: A Guide to Collecting, Scoring, Mounting and Carving,Stackpole, 2005)

What's It All About?
Shed antlers are a renewable resource. Buck deer lose their antlers every year, usually late in the winter; the specific time depends on the weather, altitude, snow cover, and food supply. Soon after the antlers drop, shed-hunters begin entering the woods to find them. Shed-hunting has emerged over the last 10 years or so as one of the very best ways to excuse yourself from having to help with spring cleaning, and it has recently become especially popular. In fact, shed-hunting is a sport that the entire family can enjoy, and it's a great way to get your partner and the kids more interested in the outdoors and begin to learn how to really ''see'' nature.
You'll sharpen your own eye as well. There's a certain excitement to knowing that the buck whose antlers you've just found is probably still very much alive (most deer hunting seasons end before bucks begin to shed) and might already have begun growing another set of antlers, though you might wonder why buck deer seemingly waste all that time and nutritional energy growing antlers only to shed them The outdoorsmen who first popularized shed-hunting weren't looking for antlers; they were in the woods seeking the signs and sounds of spring gobbler turkeys. Over the last couple of decades, the population of wild turkeys and the popularity of hunting them grew at an enormous rate, and the result was many more thousands of hunters in the springtime woodlands. The deer population also increased greatly, which resulted in more antlers being shed, and the net effect was more people finding more antlers.
Pretty soon, shed antlers were showing up all over the place wherever braggarts gathered. Turkey hunters began boasting about the antlers they'd found more than the than the weights of the gobblers they had bagged. They could have kept their mouths shut and kept this sport all to themselves, but that's asking an awful lot of the typical spring turkey hunter.

Where to Find Shed Antlers
How difficult is it to find a shed antler? Let's do the numbers and put this question in perspective. In whitetail deer country, which these days is just about everywhere except in your house and maybe up on the roof . . . except on Christmas Eve (no, wait. those are caribou), the approximate average post-hunt population density could be fewer than 20 deer per square mile. Of those deer, probably only five are bucks with antlers.
(That's because each year approximately 60 to 75 percent of all bucks are killed during deer season.) These bucks each have two antlers, so when they're shed, that's 10 shed antlers per square mile. If you didn't know anything about the movements of deer, you'd have to search 64 acres (one-10th of a square mile) to maybe find one antler. That's an area approximately equal to five football fields side-by-side, including the goalposts, the benches, and the cheerleaders. One antler . . . or you could search all day and not even find one. Here's where the experienced deer hunter has an advantage. You look for shed antlers where you'd hunt for deer. Taking this a step further, the odds are good that wherever you find shed antlers this spring, you'll find the bucks that grew them next fall.
Consider this: if during the fall hunting season you find a large deer track in the snow or soft ground, the only thing you positively know about that mystery deer is that it has big feet. (Either that, or you're in a cow pasture.)
But when you find an antler, you know for certain that a buck has been there. Obviously, this works the other way around, too;. If you look where you saw bucks last autumn, you're more apt to find their shed antlers later, in the spring.
The successful shed-hunter has learned not just where to look, but how to look, how to scan the ground without getting dizzy and falling over too often. Those of us who are deer hunters are self-trained to look for game at the extreme range of our line of sight most of the time, and only occasionally to look down at where our feet are for tracks and other signs of deer. The shed-hunter needs to look somewhere in between the far and the near in order to discover antler tips projecting above receding snow, or the bent, brown beam of an antler among the straight gray trunks of fallen branches and snow-twisted vines.
Develop a strategy for finding shed antlers the same way you would find deer.
During the summer, both the bucks and the does tend to use the same routes between bedding areas and feeding areas almost every day. But once the rut (the breeding season) begins in the fall, bucks change those travel patterns so as to keep track of female deer by means of scent, whether or not the does are yet in heat. Following well-established deer trails
through the woods is better than nothing, but bucks during the rut are inclined just to intercept these trails, not walk along them. They are more often seen traveling along or just inside the contours of heavy cover, such as dense thickets, or along the edges of agricultural fields, hedgerows and wooded drainage ditches.
Bedding areas are excellent places to look for shed antlers because the bucks spend a lot of time during the day resting in one place, and their antlers are just as apt to shed there as elsewhere. The actual shedding of antlers occurs in late winter, a time of year when deer are more apt to bed down on the southeastern sides of slopes that see more of the sun and provide some protection from those cold winter winds. Big bucks usually squeeze into the heaviest cover they can find, and that's where you need to put your head down and push your way through. Once you're in there, look for deer trails and also for rubs where deer have scraped the bark off saplings while removing their autumn velvet.
Shed-hunters have told me they've more than once found two shed antlers lying perfectly side by side, as though the deer had sneezed and blown them off.
Sheds are often found next to where the buck has bedded down for the night, which makes sense since in late winter or spring, deer usually spend a lot of their time either resting or eating. (Can you imagine how it would feel to wake up in the morning without your antlers?) Deer tend not to travel much in bad winter weather, and if the snow has been deep and the deer have ''yarded up,'' you'll probably be able to find more matched pairs in the general area around its bed. (It's important that you don't put any extra stress on the yarded deer with your late winter shed-hunting, so stay out of the bedding area itself, at least until the snow cover has melted to a shallow depth.) Finding a matched pair is usually a rare event, and most of the time, even if you do eventually find the second antler, it will have fallen a lot farther away than you had hoped.
Although in an emergency a deer can plunge into or jump over the kind of impenetrable cover that even a small dog would have difficulty getting through, some of the time they take the easy way... just like you would.
Such shortcuts often include hayfields along well-established trails, which aren't hard to find in the tall grasses once you know what to look for, and which generally remain the same from year to year. My personal experience with deer trails is this: Whenever I'm casually walking through the woods where I live in Western New York State, just 4 miles north of the Pennsylvania border, if I look down, I can usually find a deer print close by. This often means that I've been following a deer trail unconsciously because it was the easiest path for me to follow.
Open fields in snow country can be great places to look for antlers if the snow was shallow at the time of year that bucks were dropping their antlers.
For example, where I live and do most of my hunting in rural Western New York State, shedding reaches a peak around the middle of February. If the snow is shallow then, deer move out into the fields at night to paw the ground for the underlying green herbs and weeds. But if the snow is too deep, they remain back in the woods in search of other foods and shed their antlers there. One local shed hunter told me that if the right combination of winter snow and the peak of shedding occur, it's possible to find maybe even a dozen antlers within a few acres of open field once the snow thaws. Shed antlers so commonly appear along trails through hayfields and other agricultural fields that they're found too often (and too late!) stuck into the tires of farmers' tractors, causing expensive flats. It's a common event.
Think about the odds: the tread of a farm tractor covers maybe 20 percent of the width of the tractor's path, which means that every five times a farmer tills a field or cuts hay where there's a fallen antler, he will either squash the antler into the earth or suffer a punctured tire. I personally know of two such men who've had antler-flattened tires just within the past year.
Antlers are shed following the rut, when the buck's testosterone drops below a level that is needed for the continued sustenance of living bone. This complex process is controlled in part by declining sunlight and usually happens in a surprisingly short time, sometimes just a few days or less. The seal connecting the antler to the pedicle begins to weaken and whereas one day a buck could be dragged from the woods by his antlers, they might fall off easily only a day or two later if he moves his head too quickly.
Usually, only one antler falls off first, followed soon, but maybe not until 5 miles later, by the other one. Whitetail bucks often shake their heads vigorously to rid themselves of the imbalance of only one antler. Gary Alt, a Pennsylvania wildlife biologist, reports having seen a captive buck that, having just lost one antler, wedged the remaining antler in the fork of a tree and wrenched it off, including with it, unfortunately, a bloody piece of its skull. The buck survived, but the next two years the antler that grew there was misshapen.

Shed Antlers by Age of Whitetail Bucks
The odds are that nearly two out of three shed antlers you find will be little spikes or fork horns from yearling bucks. Well, maybe not÷big antlers are easier to find than small ones. But if you want to know what the probable breakdown of antlers by age out there on the forest floor, take a look at the following table.

This article was excerpted from the author's newest book, ANTLERS: A Guide to Collecting, Scoring, Mounting and Carving. More information about this and other books by Walrod can be found at www.denniswalrod.com. Dennis Walrod lives in Lakewood, N.Y.