Ground-Truthing Bucks

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To hone your skills at estimating the age of bucks in trail-camera photos, nothing you can do is more important than ground-truthing. That means killing bucks that you believe meet your age goal, pulling their jawbones, and comparing jawbone age estimates with your earlier estimates from when the bucks were alive. This exceeds the benefits …

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3 Ways to Track Fawn Recruitment

| By Dr. Will Gulsby and Dr. Karl V. Miller
Over the last decade, predators, especially coyotes, have greatly altered deer population dynamics in many parts of the country by reducing fawn recruitment (the number of fawns per doe that survive to 6 months of age). Not surprisingly, the level of their impact varies from one state to another, and often even from one property …

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VIDEO: Jawbone Aging: Part 3 – Quiz

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How sharp are your skills at estimating deer age from tooth replacement and wear patterns? Before you find out by taking our video quiz, review the first two instructional videos in our three-part series:

Part one – How to use tooth replacement to classify deer ages into three groups – fawns, yearlings (1.5 year old deer) and adult deer (2.5 or older).

Part two – How to evaluate tooth wear patterns to separate adult deer by age class.

 

Off-Season Trail-Camera Fun

| By Gil Lackey
The bucks are dropping their headgear and are starting to again tolerate each other, presumably pardoning all the hard feelings stirred up during the rut. It’s time to yank the trail-cameras and stuff them into hibernation until next year. Well, not so fast! July through January is all about figuring out what the deer are …

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Turning Shed Antlers Into Skinning-Shed Bucks

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Follow Matt on Instagram. Some people are just plain lucky when it comes to finding shed whitetail antlers. Others spend countless hours walking the ground they hunt, only to come up empty-handed. Though I have found my share over the years, I shudder to think how many shed antlers I have probably walked by while …

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