Sheds: Unlocking the Secret

As a cold winter wind blew hard outside, Dr. Fred and I sat by a roaring fireplace enjoying the warmth, light and the amber liquid in our tumblers. He spun a heavy, weathered shed in his hand, tracing the long G-2 with his finger.

"It would be nice to catch up with this buck during hunting season," Fred said. "This is the mature buck we're looking for." I'd stumbled across the shed, complete with sticker points, in a nasty thicket that morning. It had been dropped the previous winter and was starting to bleach out, but the squirrels and mice had somehow missed the bone. A cool kicker-point on the base added to its intrigue.

Rifle season was in its dying throes. The travel route I watched as dawn broke turned out to be the road less traveled. I spent the morning sulking around a river bottom, trying to put the pieces together that would allow me to fill out my home-state buck tag for the first time in years. The shed almost poked a hole through my boot sole as I unadvisedly followed the trail into a bedding area. It was enough to turn me back and get Dr. Fred and I thinking about the shed's previous owner and where he spent his time.

Turns out, sheds can tell you a lot, and some of the better hunters and biologists I know can read them like tea leaves. They hold clues to where bucks spend their time and can be a valuable clue for next year's late-season hunting. For deer managers, professional or amateur, sheds can really help fine-tune a program and are a tremendous diagnostic tool. More than interesting coat hangers and knife handles, sheds are an important scouting and management tool.

Like a machinist replacing worn and broken tools after a shift, bucks shed their antlers each year. Antlers are important to bucks--self-defense from predators and fighting for breeding rights are two obvious uses. The tines get broken and worn, so evolution engineered a way to replace the tools every year. The buck's testosterone levels control the antler cycle, and those levels are determined by the amount of daylight, or photoperiod. As the days shorten in late summer, testosterone levels increase, causing antlers growing under a coat of velvet to harden. In late winter, longer days cause a drop in testosterone and a layer of skin between the antler's base and the skull's pedicle to die, and the antler falls off. The pedicle quickly scabs over, and the antler cycle begins again.

Bucks usually drop both antlers within days of one another, sometimes hours, often rubbing them on trees to facilitate separation. Once they hit the ground, it's up to the diligent hunter to find them before the squirrels and mice can gnaw them into oblivion. An old friend of mine, John Seginak, has finding sheds down to a science.