Ep. 1042: Foundations – How Whitetail Antlers Came To Be and Why We Love Them So Much

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson. In today’s episode is all about all of those bucks out there that are just starting to grow their new sets of antlers and how amazing that really is, and also why we just love antlers. I had two experiences with antlers recently that reminded me how cool they really are. One involved finding a shed from last season on a little property I own, which is the first antler I’ve ever found on any ground I’ve owned, which covers a fifteen year time span now. The other was a video of a young buck that already has a tar get on his back from one of my daughters. Antlers are just fascinating, and honestly, we kind of take it for granted how they come to be and what they really mean. That seems confusing, don’t worry, because I’m gonna break it down right now. I’m at the stage of my hunting career where I’m just done with shoulder mounts. For a long time, you know, having a set of antlers on the wall meant a lot to me, and having a buck dead that was worthy of a trip to the tax at Ermis meant even more to me. But at some point, about five or six years ago, I just realized I don’t need any more shoulder mounts. The truth about it is that I kind of realized no one really cares about them but me, and at some point I’ll be dead and no one will care about them at all. I don’t regret mounting deer in the past, and still have plenty of antlers around that remind me of some of my most exciting and rewarding times in the outdoors. I’m just at the point now where I’d rather take my tax at Army money and dump it into my retirement accounts or use it to take my daughter’s fishing somewhere. I guess I’m more into like experiences now.

00:02:00
Speaker 3: That’s just me.

00:02:01
Speaker 2: I am still wildly interested in antlers in general. I freaking love shed hunting, and I love hunting deer, and I’ve never been pissed, not once in my life, to see a buck of any size walking down the trail toward me. I’m guessing you feel the same way if you’re devoting any of your time listening to me drone on and on about deer. But do you really know the story of antlers. It’s pretty wild, and it starts somewhere around twenty to twenty five million years ago when the deer family Serve a Day appeared on the scene. This was a time when new mammals started to replace the ones that didn’t quite survive the Oligasine epoch, and newcomers besides the deer, ancestors to hit the landscape include the first hyenas and the first weasels. It’s pretty easy to understand how evolution would eventually settle on large canine teeth, for example, like you might find tucked inside of a lion’s mouth. And it’s not really a stretch to think about teeth becoming, you know, a bigigger and bigger weapon, as well as some sort of defensive signal, which means, you know, you can think about a walrus here.

00:03:07
Speaker 3: But antlers, it’s kind of an unusual one.

00:03:11
Speaker 2: Luckily for us and the deer, some of the earliest critters in the lineage had bony skull outgrowths. This is important because evolution tends to work better when the only change it needs just involves a structure that already exists, instead of coming up with a whole new weapon system. Over time, birds and animals and probably fish and who knows what else often have ornamental appendages or plumages that help with mate selection. This seems to be the primary driver behind deer eventually growing larger and more branching sets of bone on their foreheads, but being strapped with the baddest weapons in the forest doesn’t likely count as the sole reason modern antlers came to be. We all know males compete with other males for the ladies, and the winners of fights just generally get to pass along their genes more than the losers. That’s evolution in a nutshell, but it doesn’t tell the whole story of antlers. The bucks with big antlers, the one who meets the buck with small antlers might never have to risk his eyesight or his life to prove how bad as he is. Think about it, if you had to duel with someone you know, like an old timey duel. I don’t know why you would want to, but bear with me here. If you were given a I don’t know, let’s say a single shot thirty two caliber pistol and the dude you were supposed to duel with was handed a semi ato twelve gage stuff to the gills with tungsten turkey loads, you might just decide to no show for the duel that day. This is the goal with almost all species out there, maybe all of them, you know, which is to pass on your jeans a lot while having to take on as little risk as possible. This has a further advantage which is tied to something called the handicap principle. Essentially, a big set of antlers comes with a large biological cost, and all of those doze out there looking at at Bucks all day to decide which ones to lock down with. They see that giant set of antlers and realize that that is a deer that has resources to spare. He’s doing so well that he can devote extra resources to extravagant headgear. I mean, why do you think just about every one of us wants to make more money and a secretly kind of pissed when we meet someone who has a huge property and awesome vehicles in a giant house and seemingly unlimited funds. Or maybe a better way to put this is, you know, we as a society have kind of just decided all billionaires are evil, except I guess Taylor Swift. But we don’t talk about how we’d all definitely not turned down a billion dollars if it was offered to us, and yes, our lives would change to resemble the upper class more than we’d care to admit, because when you have crazy amount of resources, we have a crazy amount of high value options in life. Now, you could say that the buck equivalent of having you know, say, one hundred billion dollars to your name, would be having six hundred inches a bone on top of your head. But those don’t exist, and the closest we get are farm deer that are not what nature intended and never.

00:06:07
Speaker 3: Probably will be.

00:06:08
Speaker 2: But real bucks don’t get to that size, and that’s because natural selection and sexual selection pull in opposite directions. Maybe the does would choose that six hundred inch buck every time because well, maybe they’re shallow and they can’t see the good characteristics of your average spike buck with a great personality. But the truth is, evolution tends to settle where the survival costs aren’t totally out of balance with reproductive benefits. In other words, at some point, antler’s got big enough to do all of the jobs necessary, but not so big as to cause a higher likelihood of death to the owner. If you can’t run through the woods or hold your head up for more than a few minutes at a time because you have two tree trunks sprouting from your noggin, the wolves and the coyotes and whoever else are going to figure that out real quickly, and they’re going to eat you. Antlers are cool, way beyond on what I’ve talked about so far, though, as I mentioned in the intro, I recently found a shed off a two year old buck in northern Wisconsin. That part of the whole thing is fascinating too, and it’s what differentiates antlers from horns, which don’t fall off and regenerate every year. We all know that once the rut winds down and the whole deer fervor grinds nearly to a halt, that a buck’s testosterone levels drop like the temperature. In response to this, they develop specialized cells that help dissolve the bone at the pedicle until both sides fall off. Why might you ask, Well, antlers are expensive to deer, a big buck, you know, run down from the rut, and who doesn’t really need to display his male prowess any longer doesn’t need to carry around a bunch of extra weight on his head. It’s kind of as simple as that, and an easy way to understand it for any of us.

00:07:54
Speaker 3: Just carry around some extra weight. You don’t have to strap a.

00:07:57
Speaker 2: Dumb belt to your forehead here to understand this, although if you do, please send me photos of your attempts. Really, just pick up something heavy and carry it around for a while, and then maybe, I don’t know, climb a couple flights of stairs while carrying it, or go for a long walk, hell, maybe a swim, maybe a run. This is the thing that a lot of people don’t seem to understand that today about weight loss and the general condition of our bodies, we think we all have a pretty sweet beach body, except for maybe a few extra stubborn pounds. But even fifteen extra pounds is a lot when you make the decision to carry it around voluntarily. And if you ever go to the gym and grab like a forty five pound plate carry that sucker around, you realize pretty quickly how much you don’t want to carry that kind of weight around.

00:08:50
Speaker 3: When it’s a part of your body.

00:08:52
Speaker 2: You’re going to do a lot of extra work while doing the things you do every day, and that comes at a cost of having to rest more, eat more, and you know, just potential injury. It’s really no different for deer. But this discussion doesn’t end when the antlers hit the dirt, you know, and the turkeys start to gobble, because those bucks need a new set of antlers, and it doesn’t take long before they start growing.

00:09:16
Speaker 3: And this part’s truly wild.

00:09:18
Speaker 2: It all starts with the amount of daylight out there, just like so many transitions in nature, you know, as this sets off a hormonal shift in a buck’s body, and the very first thing to happen, you know, include the formation of cartilage like tissue and blood vessels and then stem cells which rapidly divide. This all happens at the pedicles. What will eventually become bone doesn’t start that way. It’s living tissue as the very first beginnings of antlers grow. We all know they start out covered in velvet. But what is velvet besides a cool, hairy like covering on antlers that actually looks really sweet on a mount if you’re lucky enough to shoot one, you know, in the earth season that hasn’t stripped yet. Velvet is actually a specialized kind of skin which contains a highly dense network of blood vessels. It’s covered in hair, and it’s full of nerves. What velvet does is a lot for starters. It delivers oxygen to fuel all that rapid growth. It also supplies minerals like calcium, protein, magnesium, and phosphorus, which bucks get from crops forbes, lugumes, and well nearly any kind of fresh vegetation. That last one is important because, like I said, antlers are expensive to grow and the only season when the nutrients are easily available, while the opportunity to also be kind of lazy and not waste a bunch of energy happens in the late spring and throughout the summer. Velvet is essentially the supply line to the antlers when they are in the growth stage, and while most of us will never see it, velvet is absolutely full of blood. This is because antlers demand a lot and the delivery mechanism can’t have any downtime. Researchers have measured antler growth of up to three centimeters per day, which might not sound like a lot, but it’s pretty hard to find a mammal that can grow bone faster. The thing is, all of that summer growth happens just crazy fast, But so does the moment bucks go from velvet to truly hard antlered. I’ve hunted early season bucks a whole bunch of different states where you have a legitimate shot at killing a velvet deer, and it always blows my mind how I can watch a buck in the morning that is fully in velvet and then see him in the evening and he’ll be totally stripped. The whole thing happens fast, and it basically involves the cartilage framework that allows blood vessels to invade deeper tissues, and then along the way, bone producing cells called osteoplasts deposit minerals throughout the antlers, which is when calcium and phosphorus harden the whole structure and dense bone replaces soft tissue. And when that’s complete, which up here where I live, and very likely where you live. Happens in about the first ten days of September. The buck strip off their velvet and they revealed their new headgear. Now, that’s perfect world stuff, which doesn’t always exist in nature. Antler growth isn’t always a resounding success, and it can vary a hell of a lot due to a variety of reasons. An injury to a deer’s pedicle can cause this. Now you don’t see this very often, but once in a while you’ll see a buck that has an antler that just, you know, colors way outside the lines. I missed a buck like this one time on some public land here in the Twin Cities. He was a deer that had a nice four point side, but the other side his main beam drooped all the way down and kind of looped around his chin. Now, if you look at an old school NFL helmet, or you know, a more modern NFL Kickers helmet, you can kind of get the gist of what I mean. He wasn’t a giant, but when he walked out and I saw what he was working with, I immediately shot right over his back. Antlers can also get pretty wonky if they get injured during the growth stage. I don’t know if this is true, and it could be due to factors like heat or maybe bugs, but I often see bucks betting in the summer in grassy swales in places that you just don’t really expect them. A lot of times I wonder if that’s a protective measure when their antlers are particularly prone to injury. Now, hormonal abnormalities are another contributor to antlers not doing what we expect them to do. We forget this about animals in general, but a lot of the weird shit humans have wrong with them can also be found in nature too, we just aren’t aware of it. This is also kind of tied to the idea that we can age dear on the hoof by just looking at them, which drives me crazy. We just don’t consider the array of genetics responsible for body shape and size and really only think about genetics and how they relate to antlers. But deer bodies outside and inside are wildly variable, and sometimes those variables aren’t great for signaling proper growth of new antlers. Nutritional stress is another one. Where I hunt in northern Wisconsin, the big bucks are as big as the big bucks get pretty much anywhere, but the young bucks are often a hell of a lot smaller than they are in southern Minnesota, or in Iowa, or in Illinois, or in Kansas.

00:14:14
Speaker 3: Or Missouri, or take your pick.

00:14:16
Speaker 2: Long winners, shorter growing seasons, less agriculture. All that stuff works in concert to produce smaller antlers and the deer that are least likely to have access to any of the good resources. I remember seeing one of my uncle’s trophy rooms when I was growing up. It was just amazed that’s how small a lot of the bucks were. But that was because I only had access to southern Minnesota deer and had never spent any real time around the deer that could have walked to Canada within a day or two and not hardly even stressed about it. A healthy deer is a deer with a variety of good nutritional options, and those are the deer that can devote more resources to growing headgear. It’s one of the reasons so many of the big time TV hunters have really tightly managed its properties. It’s not just to keep big bucks around and keep other people out, but to keep as many bucks around as long as possible and give them all as stress free of a life as possible. Stress just doesn’t favor giant antlers, and if that stress involves not getting a whole lot to eat, it only gets worse. This is sort of an abstract concept because we can’t see it happen in real time, kind of like evolution. But one thing that has been absolutely fascinating to me about where I live is that the last three winners have been very mild. Our turkeys have been consistently heavy the last couple springs, our baths seem to be heavier, and the deer seem to be doing just fine with antlers, even in the areas I hunt where I might run into more wolves than white tails.

00:15:43
Speaker 3: I don’t know.

00:15:44
Speaker 2: I just think, honestly, antlers are cool, and we aren’t the only people to believe that. For tens of thousands of years, humans have used antlers in architecture, art, rituals. Antlers have been involved in human culture for a long long time and have often been viewed as a status of hunting success or fertility, a connection to the spiritual world. They’re sometimes used as a symbol of strengths. Headdresses with antlers on them have been found dating back to at least eleven thousand years ago. Cave art often depicts antlered animals with highly exaggerated headgear, and often part human part animal depictions where antlers are very prominent. Siberian and Eurasian cultures use them in ceremonies and shamanic traditions. Indigenous North American cultures use them as tools, decorative objects, and more. We’ve been displaying antlers and ogling over them for a long time and probably will for a hell of a lot longer. At least I hope we do, because I think that even though we’ve sort of fetishized Big Bucks to the point where it’s gotten a little weird out there, the truth is that a lot of us are connected to antlers and the animals that grow them, not just because we like having something to do during a couple of week in DS in September and October, November December, but because they represent something pretty amazing in nature and are in some ways a tether from our modern selves to those that walk the land. Long before it would become a pastime to hunt, but was instead one of the primary ways to not only see another sunset, but to get the opportunity to pass on our genes as well. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast. Thank you so much for listening. If you need some more hunting content, maybe some phishing content, head on over to the mediater dot com. We drop new articles, you know how to articles, conservation articles, the latest news in the outdoors type articles. We drop new podcasts. We have a ton of great podcasts on this network. We drop new films all the time, just tons of new content. Go check it out at the mediator dot com and once again, thank you for your support.