I finally got my buck this hunting season, and with the digital ammunition that I prefer. I’ve been unsuccessfully trailing this hefty white-tailed deer since mid-October, sometimes getting wet and filthy from slipping and sliding in the bogs that he likes.
But, early yesterday morning, I had the good luck that persistence sometimes provides. I saw him looking the wrong way as he browsed a field’s edge; and, even more fortunately, he was upwind from me. I got within “shooting” range for the first time.
He then sensed something, stiffened, and quickly looked over his shoulder at me with widened eyes and flared nostrils (“click, click”). He spun and, with several loping steps (“click”), glided back into the woods like the ghost he has become to me.
He has eight “points” on his “rack,” although two are small and perhaps cannot be “scored” as points yet. Researchers are quick to explain that these bucks (and a few abnormal does) wear pointed “antlers,” not “horns.”
Antlers are “cast” (away) each winter and regrown quickly in the spring and summer. Horns (think goats and rhinos) continuously grow slowly from their core, as I understand it. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on November 20, 2022.)