Oct 25, 2014 4 min read

Like every other hairy-chested and hard-hunting man I am starting to look for deer, or should I say bucks.

It is obvious that the rut is still a week or so away. That means the best archery hunting is still ahead of us. Another thing I noticed is the high number of bucks with small racks. Just the other evening, I spotted four bucks and put the binoculars on each. Three were spikes and the other a four-pointer, none of which is legal.

I do know of two real trophies roaming around my place. I have only seen them once but did get a decent look. I had a person with me and he kept telling me to look at the spread on the one on the right.

I told him to look at the height of the one on the left. I will take height over spread any time.

The high racks usually have long tines and if you add three inches on each point of a buck carrying 10 points, you have 40 inches right there. That’s a lot of inches for a wide-antlered buck to make up. If a buck is to reach the minimum score of 170 to make the record books, it needs at least four tines that exceed 10 inches.

Main beams must be around 25 inches, and here is the trouble spot, should be even. Broken or growing tines from a point forming a Y will lower the score significantly.

I say this because when it comes to judging a deer that was mounted or is still eating farmer Brown’s alfalfa, it is something I do better than most hunters. I have handled large antlers every year I have been an official scorer, sometimes handling more than 100 racks in a year.

Antlers have fascinated men since the beginning of time, and they are strange.

Remember, while horns are made up of keratode, the same thing as fingernails, antlers are bone. The unusual thing about antlers is, unlike other bones, they receive blood from external blood vessels (velvet).

This velvet in late summer or fall sloughs away. The antlers are then carried proudly by the buck and are what many hunters seek.

There are those who will tell another that antlers are there for protection, but if that were true they would be carried all the time. Instead they are shed around Christmas, when weather conditions favor the predators.

They are there performing a purpose related to reproduction. After all, the time of breeding coincides with the antler display.

Another mistaken belief among humans is that the velvet is cleaned off by rubbing a tree. There are studies on this and it was found that the velvet will slough off without the aid of rubbing.

Antlers are at full growth and cleaned of any velvet when the buck is first in the rut. The local trees will be stripped of bark as the buck works the tree relieving the itching of the velvet.

He also will be found pawing the dirt and creating a scrape. After he prepared the soil to his satisfaction, he will urinate in it. He also will deposit other bodily fluids in soil.

A really good scrape will be found under an overhanging tree branch. Most often the tree will show evidence of the bucks battles with it. Its sort of like a boy playing cowboys and Indians. He is practicing for the days an interloper messes with his harem.

Actually, the buck doesn’t build a harem but instead finds a girlfriend and stays with her for a couple of days.

This brings me to a last bit of advice about judging the size of a buck by the size of the tracks in the scrape.

Keep in mind that a doe might have come on the scene and left her print as a calling card.

George H. Block writes a Sunday Outdoors column for the Observer-Reporter.