Antler Shedding

It's that time of year again for our white-tailed deer.  The bucks are starting to shed their antlers and they are available for mice to chew on, for dogs to play with, and for some of us to collect.

So why do antlers drop in January, February, and March?  Well, to answer that question, we've got to think back to the previous year.

In late October, most of November, and early December the deer here are in rut.  This means that they capable of mating with females.  Antlers are used to display dominance and to fight off other bucks that may provide competition to the mating "rights" of a group of does.

The rut ends before the New Year starts and the antlers become less of a necessity for bucks.  Since they take extra energy to grow and walk around with, deer shed or drop their antlers to save energy and because they really aren't needed any more.

New antlers begin to grow and the process is repeated, year after year.

It's legal in Virginia to collect them and possess them (as long as you have landowner permission to do so), so I always like to find a few to collect.  Maybe I'll even make some new knife handles again this year

There is an importance to leave some for the animals though.  Mice, squirrels, and other rodents chew on antlers to sharpen their teeth and to gain important vitamins and minerals that can become extremely scarce in the winter from their regular food sources.

One Antlered Deer

Here's an interesting white-tailed deer missing one of his antlers.

It's early for bucks to be losing their deciduous antlers.  Really early.  In most cases around here, they drop their antlers during the last week of January to the last week of March.  It's interesting, for sure, but stranger things have happened in the outdoors.

Antler Growing Season

It's antler growing season (and will be for the next couple of months) for white-tailed deer.  They'll grow them out, shed their velvety coat, and use them for battle in the winter.  Like spears, the antlers on the tops of white-tailed bucks heads are used for display and fighting.

Proper nutrition and genetic makeup is necessary for growing the biggest pair.

Here's one little buck starting that has been already growing his antlers since a few weeks ago.

Deer Exodus

The melting snow in the Shenandoah Valley from last week and rain all around have made the Potomac River rise to "Flood Stage".  It's raging and is a dangerous monster when this happens.

Flowing on top of the water is a scattered garbage dump full of what I call "River Nonsense".  River nonsense is mostly made up of pieces of lumber, sticks, oil barrels, and general trash.  It's all the stuff that gets moving when the river floods its own banks.  It's not pretty, but sort of interesting in a weird way.

With the flowing water and garbage also comes another interesting sight.  Deer (the white-tailed variety of course) are swimming all over the place.  They're swimming to islands, from islands, to the mainland, and all over.  

They do this because some of them live on the islands of the Potomac River across from Great Falls, Virginia.  There are islands big and small, and when the river water rises this high, it makes for a very crammed problem for these deer. 

So what do these deer do?  The move, and to move away, they start swimming.

I saw this today and have only seen it once before during Hurricane Sandy's wrath.

I couldn't get a good picture of the deer since they were maybe around 300-400 yards away, but it was quite a sight.

Deer Mingling

It's that time of year again in Virginia.  A time when the white-tailed bucks get curious.

For the past few months, big bucks have been seen hanging out with each other.  Soon, mating season will be upon them, and during that time, these bucks will be in strict competition with one another.

For now though, they still seem to be civil.

Mingling with the does has started though.  A  buck kissing (or possibly smelling) a doe was caught on my camera a few days ago.

 

The Most Common Camera-Trap Visitor Is. . .

The white-tailed deer!

Deer walking on a popular game trail in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Other animals can't even come close to showing up in numbers comparable to deer. 

I have known this fact since I started doing this, but today I crunched some numbers to get exact percentages of deer having their pictures taken by my cams.  

It took some time to organize thousands of pictures into files and folders, but the time I spent doing this offered a good break from studying for my looming final exams that I have been spending a ridiculous amount of time on in the past week.

The results below omit videos, pictures of me taken by the cameras, false camera triggers, and test pictures.

White-tailed deer hold the record for most camera-trap images taken at a staggering 52% of total images of animals.  

Raccoons can't even catch up, but hold steady in second place by appearing in 29% of my pics.

Foxes come in third place and have shown up in 12% of my pics.

All other animals shown on this blog make up for the 7% that is in my collective category of fourth place.

What makes deer have such a greater number of camera appearances is based on a whole combination of factors.  

First of all, deer are very numerous in northern Virginia, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to see them so often.  

Deer also frequently travel in pairs or small groups.  If a camera triggers where there are multiple deer (as the cameras often do), the deer appearance rate goes up significantly since I account for multiple individuals of the same species in these statistics.  Deer also travel in both day and night and aren't as camera shy as many other animals are.

Deer live alongside humans in many areas of northern Virginia.  Seeing a camera in the woods does not seem to bother deer at all, since they are so used to human-made objects anyway.

Other factors to consider when wondering why deer show up so often are:  travel patterns, food availability for deer vs. other animals, skittishness, camera placement, camera height, mating seasons of deer vs. other animals, other animals in the area, how frequently I check the cameras, and many many more.