Broken Antlers

[JonW]

All three bucks killed on/near my family's farm this year have been pretty broken up, including two with main beams broken near G-2. Is this a coincidence or an indication that the buck-doe ratio is leaning two heavily toward bucks?

Here are two examples:

ImageUploadedByTapatalk1455309354.976004.jpg (330.93 KiB) Viewed 374 times

ImageUploadedByTapatalk1455309321.209768.jpg (347.51 KiB) Viewed 374 times

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[BSK]

Heavy fighting is usually the sign of a more advanced buck age structure AND a fair number of "traveling" bucks. Bucks that summer together know each other and have established their pecking long before they have hard antlers. It's when "new" bucks appear mid-season that trouble ensues.

[JonW]

Both of these buck were killed in the same area in a creek bottom. Neither was seen before in person or on camera, so that makes sense.

The neighbor that killed the bottom buck (I found him last week) and I have killed our share of does over the last 15 years or so and have seen tremendous improvement in ratio and age structure-some years we see more bucks than does.

Have you ever seen a ratio lean too far toward bucks under normal high-pressure conditions?


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[BSK]

Have you ever seen a ratio lean too far toward bucks under normal high-pressure conditions?

Yes.

We never published our results because we couldn't make heads or tails of WHY we saw what we did, but once the adult sex ratio favored males over females by about 1.5 to 1, we saw the exact same problems we had been seeing with skewed adult sex ratios in the other direction (too many females). As soon as the sex ratio tipped over beyond 1.5 males per female, breeding dates backed up and the breeding sequence stretched way out--sort of a trickle rut--just like what we saw when we had too many does. We never came up with a workable biological theory for why that occurred, but we saw it occur in two different geographic locations with identical results.

In addition, very high buck mortality occurred most likely due to all the social conflicts between bucks.

[JonW]

Good info! I'm going to work on setting up a late winter photo census to get an overall check.


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