Trending
What is it about deer antlers that some humans find so fascinating?
I imagine that fascination began when the first prehistoric hunter managed to bring down the first antlered animal. The meat would be a most welcome product of the successful hunt to the hunter and his cohorts, but the hardness, strength and durability of the antlers would make them ideal material for tools, weapons and ornaments.
Modern-day hunters keep antlers as trophies or decorations to commemorate successful hunts. Organizations like the Boone and Crockett Club, Safari Club International and others have devised intricate scoring systems to measure antlers and to keep official records of the top-scoring animals. Some folks even collect antlers and are willing to pay mind-boggling sums for record-sized specimens.
While antlers are sometimes referred to as "horns," that is not correct. Horns are a completely different type of animal headgear than antlers. In North America, there are multiple species of big-game animals that carry either horns or antlers. Pronghorn antelopes, sheep, goats and bison have horns, while members of the deer family, which includes whitetail and mule deer, elk, moose and caribou, grow antlers.
Horns are composed of a bony core surrounded by a heavy outer layer of keratin, the same material human fingernails are made from. Antlers grow as living bone and when mature turn to hard, dead bone. Horns grow from the base, while antlers grow from the tip. Most hunters are aware that antlers are shed and regrown each year; horns are not.
Individual antlers grow from special attachment points on the animal's skull known as pedicles. Antler growth begins in spring as the growing antler is covered with a vascular skin called velvet, which brings oxygen and nutrients to the bone tissue underneath. Antlers are known as one of the fastest-growing animal tissues, growing as much as an inch a day in some specimens. Once the antlers have reached full size, typically around early September, the velvet dries out and falls off as the underlying bone dies and hardens into the mature antler.
Overall antler size varies from animal to animal and is dependent on factors such as age, nutrition and genetics. Deer will shed their antlers from December through March after the conclusion of the breeding season. The length of daylight, known as photoperiod, is the primary factor controlling the growth and shedding of antlers.
Some recent research has indicated that deer in god physical condition with access to good wintertime nutrition sources tend to retain their antlers longer.
Only male members of the deer family bear antlers with the exception of caribou. Both male and female caribou grow antlers. Male caribou generally bear large, massive antlers, and females will have smaller, more slender antlers. Male caribou, however, shed their antlers in the fall shortly after the breeding season, while the females retain their headgear through the winter.
A couple of years ago, I saw a Christmas-themed TV movie in which one of the characters made the pronouncement that all of Santa's reindeer were females. Her reasoning was only female reindeer have antlers in the wintertime, and every depiction of Santa's sleigh is with antlered reindeer, they indeed must be females.
Reindeer, of course, are simply domesticated caribou, so her logic and deduction were spot on with a few real-world facts. That is, if you happen to buy into the folklore of a guy in a red suit flying around the world on Christmas eve in a sleigh powered by eight reindeer.
In rare instances, some female deer do grow antlers. Increased testosterone levels or other hormonal imbalances can cause this freak occurrence. Rare genetic defects can cause a female deer to grow small antlers directly from the skull plate and not from a pedicle.
Such defects are permanent and not shed like normal antlers. Estimates are only about one in 20,000 females will exhibit this defect. I can remember when I started hunting, there was a special notice in the regulation booklet that came with your hunting license. It requested any hunter who killed a female deer with antlers to contact a biologist who wanted to examine the animal.
Male deer primarily use antlers as part of their breeding rituals. First, as weapons in sparring matches with rival males for access to potential mates. Most of those bouts are short encounters that establish dominance. Others can be more aggressive and result in varying degrees of physical injury to one or both combatants.
One rare occasions, the collisions of two sparring bucks are so violent that their antlers become hopelessly interlocked, a situation that ultimately leads to a gruesome, lingering death for one or both combatants.
Once the breeding hierarchy has been settled among the males, females are thought to be attracted the males with more impressive antlers. Some research has indicated that moose use their antlers as a type of hearing aid. Moose often inhabit areas of vast wilderness, and a bull moose will emit grunts and bellows to attract potential mates. Their wide, flattened antlers apparently act as a type of parabolic reflector to help detect a faraway answer to their love calls.