What makes a trophy rack?
By DENNIS APRILL, Outdoors Columnist
It started as an attempt by me to answer a simple biological question about white-tailed deer, a question that first entered my mind when I drew a bead on, but id not shoot, a buck with short, thin, pointed antlers: are spikehorn bucks doomed to be spikehorns the rest of their lives? Along the way I not only found that answer, but a wealth of the latest information on how and why some whitetails grow trophy-sized racks and others don’t. My chief source is an excellent book by Valerius Geist called "Whitetail Tracks" which was reviewed in last Sunday’s Outdoors Page.
Geist, a retired biology professor at the University of Calgary, Alberta, is a researcher who focuses on the whitetails’ evolution as a clue to what they are today. Most deer hunters know big racks are the result of genetics and diet; that fact has been well publicized in outdoor magazines for decades. A big buck generally eats high quality meals highly digestible food rich in protein, phosphate, and calcium -and genetically is the offspring of an equally large buck and a large, healthy doe. The latter is very important.
Geist has found, after studying game management during Medieval times in Europe when nobles and kings managed for trophy stags (their version of our elk), that those chosen stags were not only given the best food and were the offspring of five generations or more of selected parents, but most importantly, they had little stress in their lives. This needs some explanation.
During the rut, bucks use their antlers for sparring and fighting, the buck with the widest rack not necessarily the most dominant because a narrower rack can sometimes do damage inside the main beams of the opponent. Also, larger, more complex antler formations are more open to damage from combat, when escaping a predator in thick brush, or when avoiding a hunter.
Geist theorizes the bucks with the largest racks are those that don’t take part in the rut during their early years, but rather devote that time to putting on size by avoiding conflict. The estimates are that a buck after the rut will lose 20-25 percent of its body weight and have from 30-50 puncture wounds, the direct result of sparring. Geist writes, "Little wonder that after the rut bucks look exhausted. It suggests that the post-rut buck is not merely exhausted, but sick! It must not only heal, but recover some body conditions before winter sets in." If you believe Geist’s theory then, in essence, real trophy bucks are the deer equivalent of the middle-aged couch potato: they don’t party when they’re young, but are, instead, social misfits. However, they do avoid the rigors and wounds the others go through. Then, by middle age, these couch potatoes, like aging baby boomers, rejuvenate their hormones and become sexually active. And when they do so, they often become the dominant bucks in the mating hierarchy.
So, not only is high quality food important, and Geist lists young shrubs as superior to grasses and clover, but genetics and a life free of most stress, be it from a predator or hunter, are essential early on to grow the classic large rack. And even then, as this animal, if it survives, moves on to old age of eight years and beyond, the body mass declines, as does its antler size, which leads me back to that initial question about the spikehorn: is it doomed to be a spike for the rest of its life? "Not in the Adirondacks," Dick Sage, deer researcher with the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Newcomb, told me recently. Sage and his students have trapped, tagged and radio-collared deer for decades on the sprawling Huntington Forest managed by SUNY ESF. "We had one spikehorn we tagged who was shot years later with a 10 point, well-developed rack." Better food and less stress seem to be the contributing factors to that spike’s growth; maybe there is a lesson to be learned here.