deernut

Lots of cool stuff going on, but I'm packing for my deer hunt in the morning and don't want to be too tired to glass so I'll just provide these links and I think you'll find this stuff as interesting as I do. http://www.deernut.com/Documents/CouesWTGeneticresearchPopeYoung.pdf http://www.deernut.com/Documents/KeepTrophyRecordsHonest_2012.pdf Follow me on Twitter (@Gametrax) or Facebook (Jackrabbit Jim) for daily wildlife -- mostly game -- information. JIM

That's why I support the Right to Arm Bears. JIM

I agree with the comments so far. Black bears will kill fawns and will even try to find them, but they don't seem to be effective enough to affect the deer recruitment over a large area. Like everything in nature, there are exception and I have seen some cases where bears are able to kill a quite a few fawns in one local area, but again, based on what I have seen, they are not much of a factor in reducing fawn recruitment. The story below is about my bear hunt in the Chiricahuas in 1997 where I went back and killed a bear that I witnessed killing a fawn (don't mess with Deernut's fawns). It was published in the NRA's Hunter Magazine in their "Member Hunts" section. (FYI, I have started a new Deernut Blog that some of you may be interested in. Not sure I have time to keep up with it, but it may be interesting if I can www.deernut.wordpress.com) _______________________________________________________________ On a warm August afternoon I was hiking in the beautiful Chiricahua Mountains along the borders with Mexico and New Mexico. During this particular trip I was accompanied by retired wildlife researcher Jerry Day and we were looking for deer/vegetation research plots located back in the rugged canyons of this mountain range. Jerry had not visited these research plots in the 40 years since he completed his research on the relationships between high deer populations and important forage plants. After a few hours of trying to keep up with my 70-year-old companion, we located the most inaccessible study plot and sat to rest. Jerry remarked that the hills had become steeper in the intervening years - either by perception or recent geologic activity. Not long into our rest, we heard the bleating distress call of a Coues white-tailed deer fawn across the canyon. After a short search with binoculars, we located the fawn but only by the wild flapping wings of the hungry golden eagle which was attached, via sharp talons, to its back. The fawn was trying to seek cover in the scattered oak brush but the eagle's flapping wings slowed his progress. As we watched this remarkable scene, it was obvious the eagle would make quick work of the fawn and we would witness an event few people have the opportunity to see. Suddenly, the large bird of prey flew away and we wondered what would make this eagle abandon such a sure meal. We did not wonder long, for the eagle was almost immediately replaced by a young black bear who had come running to the sound of the fawn's distress. The fawn had hid amongst the brush and the bear simply waited for some direction. It soon came with a loud bleat from the nearly scrub oak. The bear charged immediately for the sound; there was no question what he was there for. After a few minutes of cat and mouse, or rather bear and fawn, the fawn succumbed to the inevitable and the bear slept well with a full stomach that night. A month later the bear season in that mountain range opened. I was confident because I knew there was a bear in that area that associated the sound of a fawn with a dinner bell. The opening weekend of bear season I went back into the same area where I saw the bear kill the fawn. After teaching a wildlife class at the University of Arizona, I left Tucson Friday evening and arrived at the end of the road in the Chiricahua Mountains at midnight. I parked my truck and strapped on my backpack already loaded with all the gear I thought I’d need to bring back a bear. I headed into the mountains by moonlight and set up a camp 1 mile from the nearest road, high on a ridge top. Saturday morning I left camp and hiked along the ridge, stopping at intervals to set up and call like a fawn in distress with a predator call. I was fully camouflaged and my fawn imitation was apparently right on the mark, because a few white-tailed does walked up to within 10 yards of me looking very agitated and making the soft buzzing noise they use to locate their fawns at close range. At noon, I sat under an oak tree at the end of the ridge to eat lunch and shortly after sitting down I saw a bear look at me from behind a clump of tall grass from a mere 6 yards away. I was stunned at this unexpected, although not uninvited, lunch guest. He immediately saw his error (or my rifle) and backed up quickly. I sat in disbelief for a second and tried to recount what I ate and if it could cause such hallucinations. I stood up with my rifle and the bear was still standing 10 yards away looking at me. I realized then that he was a very small yearling so I lowered my rifle and he scampered down the slope. Mid-afternoon that day, I was calling from the next high ridge overlooking a large canyon and saw a bear one-half mile down canyon swimming across a small pond. At that distance, I was not sure if he heard my calling or if I happened to spy him before he was within hearing range. He stopped on the near side of the pond and shook off. I screamed like a fawn with the call and he immediately broke into a run at full speed towards me! It took a while for him to cover all that ground so I kept calling to keep him on track. Bears really look much larger when you are on the ground and they are running full speed at you -- you start to wonder if even your high-powered rifle is enough for this sudden incarnation of Nature's wrath. As he approached I stopped calling because I didn’t care for him to know my exact location. When he closed the distance to 25 yards, I dropped him in his tracks (that's close enough, thank you). I quickly went to work skinning the beast where he lay. There were no trees of suitable size to hang him within the distance I could drag him alone. I first skinned back the hide on one side and boned all meat off that side, and then repeated the procedure on the other side. After the outside meat was boned, the animal was dressed to retrieve the tenderloins. Since it would take more than one trip to get meat, hide, and camp gear out to the truck, all meat was placed into cheesecloth meat bags and secured high in an oak tree 100 yards away. The head and hide were strapped to the daypack and brought back to my ridge top camp. The camp was hastily disassembled and repacked onto the pack frame and then the bear head and hide was added and tied down securely. I packed (staggered) the head/hide and camp gear out that night (1 mile of very rugged terrain), slept in my truck through a terrible storm. The next morning I left the truck at first light with an empty pack frame and full canteen, heading back to my secluded cache of meat hung high in the oak tree. The cool rain during the night kept the meat chilled. I was thankful for that rain but not the torrential downpour that hammered me when I was halfway out of the mountains with the meat on my back. I took one of those shortcuts that are never shorter, thinking I could cut right over the last ridge instead of contouring around. The backside of the ridge was almost too steep to negotiate with my meat-laden pack and consisted of a field of jumbled granite. I could hardly walk with the rain pelting me hard, but the sharp crackle of the lightning so close to my packframe helped quicken my pace off the ridge top. Besides a freezer full of meat and a beautiful rug, I also came home with chigger bites, sunburn, a twisted ankle, blisters on hands and feet, bruised knee, and aches in muscles I didn't even know I had. My fellow biologists said they had never seen a deer biologist go through so much trouble to avenge the loss of one fawn.

I'm in WI on vacation but Amanda alerted me to this post. These dark warts are definately papillomas (aka fibromas). I have a picture and explaination in my book, but they are basically warts caused by a virus and will usually go away by themselves. They do not affect the meat. The other large furry growth does look like a herniation of the abdominal wall. No way of knowing for sure, but it can be a hole in the muscular wall that has allowed the "guts" to bulge out or it could be a fur-covered fibroma or other large growth. I've seen things like this filled with infected tissue or fat. Jim

Antler development is a very complicated process and full of strange things. I have noticed this phenomena as you described and I have assumed the same thing. It really seems as though the nutrients get shunted over to the other side. Also if a mainbeam is or single tine is damaged early in velvet, it seems like the rest of the antler on that side grows bigger. I am not aware of anyone really having any real scientific data or explanation for this. I do talk about the contralateral effect in antler growth (injuries affecting antlers) in my Chapter 4 (Antlers) of Deer of the SW. JIM Jim Heffelfinger Author, Deer of the Southwest deernut.com

Quick Follow-up: I searched a few publications I have and found the following: John Russo in his book on the Kaibab says "twins are very common and occasionally triplets are seen." In "The Whitetailed deer in WI" they say that does can have 1, 2, or 3 and that quadruplets have not been reported in WI but they have elsewhere and they cite another general wildlife textbook (no specifics). Of 10 does found in WI dead (2-yrs-old) they reported 7 had single fawns, 2 with twins, and 1 with triplets. Another sample of 33 showed that 13 had singles, 19 had twins, and 1 had triplets (3%). A book called "Deer in Maine" reported on a sample of 65 pregnant does in which 74% had twins, 21% had singles, and 5% had triplets. in "The Oak Creek mule deer herd in Utah" they mention 2 cases they know of (in MT & CO) where a doe had quadruplets, but say that in 1,169 pregnant mule deer does they examined, none had more than 3 young. They observed a doe with 4 fawns following her but felt it was more probable that she had adopted other fawns, even though they say that is extremely rare until after nursing is over. They examined the reproductive tracts of 100 breeding-age mule deer does and found that 12% had no fawns, 35% had singles, 51% had twins, and 1.2% had triplets. Observing deer in late summer (3 months after fawning) they estimated that 0.3% of does had triplets (at least one died by then). So the up-shot is this is very rare. The triplet data for WI & ME (3-5%) are much higher than what we would have in our lower-nutrition Southwest habitat. Adoption of other fawns is a possibilty, but maybe even less common than a doe actually having 3 fawns. JIM

This was sent to me by a biologist in southern NM. I can't believe Deer of the Southwest doesn't have that! Twins are the norm and triplets are rare even in areas of the country with lots and lots of nutrition. For example in the agricultural areas of southern WI, whitetails still very rarely have triplets. Adoption is possible, but it would have to be a doe fawning at the same time in the same area and this would seem unlikely - my guess is it would be less likely than 3 embryos coming to full term. I'll check my literature for more on twinning rates and triplets and get back to you. JIM

Man, this is a complicated topic. I have been following it ever since doing my graduate work in South Texas on trophy whitetails and then as Chief of Wildlife Operations on the Rio Paisano Ranch south of Corpus Christi. There seems to be 2 "camps" of researchers on this topic: one in Texas based on the work at the Kerr Wildlife Management Area and the other camp originally centered around Dr. Harry Jacobson at Mississippi State University. After leaving S.TX, I went to work for Dr. Jacobson at MSU so I had first-hand knowledge of working in both "Camps." You would think that would give me insight and clarity to explain to everyone what the real deal is. The truth is there is good research on both sides and that has lead to confusion and apparently conflicting results. The studies were designed a little differently and analyzed differently so some of the differences may just be due to the different ways they conducted the research. Still, more advanced studies (like the Kroll & Koerth study linked above) continue to add to the confusion. Better and better studies are coming up with still different results. I know almost all the people involved personnally and they are solid researchers and all right to some degree (and wrong to some degree). I'm currently 2/3rds of the way through writing a 3-part series on the Role of Genetics in Deer Management and can't post it all here before it is published. The series addresses this topic in more detail than I have seen elsewhere. I can include an excerpt from Part 1: Starting in 1973, Donnie Harmel, John Williams, William Armstrong, Jim Ott, and others began a series of progressively more complex experiments on the effects of genetics and nutrition on antler and body size in whitetails on the Kerr Wildlife Management Area. In the first experiment, 8 bucks that were spikes as yearlings and 1 buck that was a large 10-point at 3.5 years old were bred to does and the antler development of 10 generations of offspring were recorded. Researchers showed that antler size and body weight were genetically based and influenced by environmental factors like nutrition. Data collected from this captive population indicated a buck’s future antler size could be predicted by looking at his first set of antlers. On the average, bucks carrying spike antlers when they were yearlings did not grow antlers as big as those that were forked-antlered yearlings. Yearling spikes also went on to produce more spike-antlered offspring in their lifetime than bucks with forked antlers as yearlings. A more intensive analysis of the inheritance of antler characteristics was later conducted on these captive deer and most antler characters were considered to have high levels of heritability. The early studies from Kerr WMA set off the “spike wars.” If spikes were prone to producing and passing on inferior antler genes then removing spikes might be a way to cleanse the gene pool. The widespread slaughter of spikes commenced in the name of genetic purity. One of the reasons this “Gene-ocide” became so popular, so fast, was that it was fun. Finally, there was something we could actively do to improve the gene pool -- and it involved shooting deer! However, as more information became available, the idea of genetic improvement became more complex and managers were understandably confused. During this time I was completing my Master’s Degree at Texas A&M-Kingsville under Drs. Sam Beasom and Charlie DeYoung and then managing the Rio Paisano Ranch in Brooks County. This spike culling made all the sense in the world and we killed spikes on the ranch at every opportunity. I then started working for Dr. Harry Jacobson at Mississippi State University and Jacobson was giving talks and showing pictures from his captive deer herd that showed some spikes that became tremendous bucks at maturity! Some people started to point out that poor nutrition and late birth dates will also produce spike antlers in a yearling irrespective of what kind of genetics the buck has. Removing those deer would not improve genetics and may even be counterproductive. In some areas of the country with chronically poor nutrition, most yearling bucks are spikes and if culled intensively, deer managers could nearly wipe out the yearling age class. When it comes to gene pools you don’t want to drain it in order to clean it. There were criticisms that Jacobson’s anecdotal slides showing a spike-to-monster progression was not data, but simply pictures of the exceptions. So Jacobson teamed up with geneticist Steven Lukefahr to conduct an analysis of antler measurements and pedigrees of over 200 captive white-tailed deer housed at Mississippi State. Analysis of this herd from 1977 to 1993 indicated that the occurrence of spike antlers in yearling bucks was related more to environmental factors than genetics. Antler characteristics of yearlings are probably more dependent on nutrition and birth date (early or late born) because when their bodies are still growing and nutrients available for antler growth may be limited. The genetic influence of antler conformation was more detectable in older bucks (2+ years); as their bodies matured, antler size was related more to their genetic potential than their nutritional intake. The Mississippi data and the Texas data yielded what looks like contradictory results, which has led to decades of controversy. According to an independent review by Texas A&M animal geneticist Daniel Waldron, the different conclusions derived from these research efforts may simply be the result of the researchers asking slightly different questions and analyzing their data with different statistical methods. Dr. Waldron also pointed out that some Kerr WMA studies did not account for factors such as the birth date of yearling bucks, year, maternal influences, or the fact that many of the sires in the Kerr herd were related to one exceptional sire buck. The Mississippi captive herd consisted of deer from the Midwest and Southeast and this may be a problem when applying the conclusions to Texas deer. Waldron felt that neither the Texas nor the Mississippi analyses resolved this issue definitively. It seems logical that during a buck’s first year of growth, nutritional variation would have a lot to do with the size of his first set of antlers. And yet, the Kerr data showed clearly that the antler size at the yearling stage does hold some predictive value in what that animal’s antlers will look like at maturity. I cover this all in Chapter 4 of my book (Factors affecting antler size, Page 80-84). I also have a table on Page 82 that shows that 85% of spikes are yearlings and 35% of 2x2s are yearlings. This is over several years and would vary dramatically due to the amount of rain in any given year as a few of you mentioned above. So, there's a lot of information, but not a lot of answers. As I go on to write later in the series, none of this matters much because hunters can't exert enough influence on the gene pool of a free-ranging deer population to affect the gene pool so the idea of culling to improve the genes is bogus except under very very extreme culling in a captive or small and contained population. JIM

CochranJ- Rabies is possible but unlikely. The fact that we have CWD at White Sands Missle Base in SW NM is a concern, but we have not found CWD in AZ despite some aggressive sampling. Just about any disease will result in the deer not being scared of humans and drooling so there is not much to diagnose from the keyboard. I will e-mail the WMs over there (not sure if it was 28 or 29 from your message) and make sure they followup. Hopefully you gave them the catchment number or a Lat/Long. I would like them to shoot it and bring it in if they can. I'm headed out of town for a meeting until Sunday night so I won't be around to followup but I'll do what I can to get someone to check it out. JIM

I think the inconsistancy you see in the timing of rut in this thread (this year) is simply because of sample size. Spending a few days in the field glassing is not as good as whole research studies that look at the timing of rut very intensively and consistently for a couple years. JIM

OK, OK, Sheesh. Can't put nothing past you all. Here's the same elk without all the shenanigans the bear hunters use to take their pictures! You have to admit, that picture's hilarious! What is better than 3 generations of Heffelfingers spending a week together in the woods? How many non-hunters get the chance to do that? JIM

My son shot this on the morning of his 16th birthday in 6B. Anyone see a cow elk this big? My son is 160 lbs.

This was certainly the year of the velvet buck. We have seen this in at least one year in the last 15 that I remember. I have consulted with everyone who is anyone in the antler world and there is no easy answer. I had the world's leading antler researcher (George Bubenik) stay with me a few weeks ago and we discussed this. Collecting blood samples and running Testosterone levels and other hormones might result in an answer, but I don't know of anyone who has done that. To be this widespread, this can't be the result of a sickness, but has to be some widespread environmental influence. This sort of thing can be caused by a certain combination of rainfall (timing and amount) and temperature that causes certain plants to bloom in great number. Some plants contain "Phytoestrogens" which are plant compounds that act (in the buck's body) like regular estrogen and interfer with the circulation of "Manly" hormones. These kinds of things are very complex and hard to detect. So there's your typical biologist non-answer to a question. My website has a link to an article I wrote on Cactus Bucks. Click here for Cactus Bucks JIM

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my book. I am shamelessly plugging my book here, but I can't help it -- it is packed full of answers to so many quesitons I see coming up on this forum: "Photoperiod triggers physiological changes that lead up to the rut; however, there is a strong genetic factor that predetermines a certain breeding time for deer in a particular location. The peak of the whitetail rut is a little later, on average, than mule deer in the same areas. The necks of whitetail bucks begin to swell in November, but breeding doesn’t generally start until late December and may continue into late February (Table 14). The peak in rutting activity generally occurs during early to mid-January throughout most of Coues whitetail range, but rut may occur a little earlier in higher elevations of the Sierra Madres of Sonora and Chihuahua, Mexico. Some of the best information on breeding dates of Coues whitetails comes from Ockenfels et al. (1991), who monitored 36 radiocollared whitetails in the Santa Rita Mountains of southeastern Arizona. The earliest rutting behavior during that study occurred on November 7th and the latest on March 16th. Many of these extreme observations were likely inexperienced yearling bucks. The average peak of the rut was mid-January based on observations of rut behavior between 1988 and 1991. Bristow (1992) examined 20 pregnant does in this same region and found the average date of conception occurred during the first week of January. Disturbance of deer during breeding season is often raised as a factor of concern in affecting the reproductive potential of deer herds, yet many states hunt deer during the rut with no discernable negative effects. Bristow (1992) compared pregnancy rates, fawning dates, and reproductive performance of Coues whitetail does in an area where harassment during rut was intensive to another area where deer were not intensively disturbed. Researchers in this case intentionally harassed and fired rifle shots near whitetails they encountered in the disturbance area throughout December and January. Individual deer were followed until they left the study area or could no longer be located, with many deer being disturbed several times. The disturbance level in the treatment area was twice that of the undisturbed area and averaged 28 deer disturbed and 18 shots fired per day in less than six square miles. There was no difference between disturbed and undisturbed areas in pregnancy rate, number of fetuses per doe, or date of conception. There is no evidence limited and low-density hunts currently offered during the rut negatively affect reproduction." JIM

And you thought he was kidding............... Melanism is a rare abnormality in deer but it pops up once in a while. This buck circulated around the internet a few years ago. I have more about melanism and albinos in my book (which is free if you can get someone to buy it for you for Christmas). Sportsman's Warehouse has a black mountain lion (thanks to a little black dye) JIM