More broken antlers noticed this season
Healthy, hefty white-tailed deer being brought in for processing early this season was kind of a surprise for Mike Schwab of Schwab’s Sausage Haus & Barbeque, who had feared there would be a major impact from the ongoing drought.
“We were not seeing as many animals, which I expected, but overall they were all in good shape and some were actually pretty heavy,’’ said Schwab, whose operation has been processing hundreds of animals each year since 1987 and is known for the development of “Buck Sticks.”
What really caught Schwab’s attention was an unusually high number of bucks with broken or damaged antlers.
“At first, I thought the rut might have started early,” he said. “That is normally when the antlers are damaged.’’
What he learned from the hunters was that, instead of breaking their antlers during dominance battles, the bucks seemed to be losing their headgear from normally harmless encounters in the brush.
“Antlers develop from minerals and nutrients they get from what they eat,’’ said Donnie Frels, area manager of the Kerr Wildlife Management Area in Kerrville.
“Producing antlers requires a large amount of energy and nutrients, so it does not surprise me that some people are seeing a high percentage of broken antlers,’’ he said. “Of course, it could mean the bucks are fighting more or maybe people are just looking for something different with the deer because of the drought.’’
Frels said that the management area has conducted numerous studies on various aspects of white-tailed deer development since 1974, but has never specifically focused on antler creation or the strength of antlers following a drought.
“We know that a drought does have an effect and there is not much we can do about it other than to try to manage an area so the deer can maintain antler growth and body size at the proper level,” Frels said. “The deer will always do the best they can with what they have available.’’
There is little doubt in the mind of Zach Akin, scorer at Los Cazadores Deer Contest in Pearsall billed as the “World’s Largest Deer Contest,” that the drought has affected antler growth this year.
“The deer we are seeing are in good shape,” Akin said, “but a lot of the mass (antler size) is down and we are seeing more broken antlers. They do seem to be breaking their antlers much earlier than normal.’’
The antler distress is much more obvious from animals taken on low-fence ranches without any type of management program like the ones on high-fenced and game-managed properties, he added.
This observation was echoed by Gene Naquin, official Boone and Crockett Club deer scorer at the Nooner Ranch near D’Hanis, who has hands-on experience with thousands of white-tailed bucks both alive and brought in as trophies.
“On a low-fence area with no supplemental feeding, the antler density is not nearly as good as somewhere that the deer are receiving protein, calcium and other nutritional feed,’’ he said, explaining that the affect of poor nutrition is much more evident during a drought.
“If you are not feeding protein, you just won’t get the mass and really healthy antlers,’’ Naquin added.
