This will be my 19th season bowhunting so I'm by no means a rookie and I've seen and watched my share of deer. 9 times out of 10 it is easy to tell the difference, but there is always that 10th time. For example, a few years ago I was hunting over some apple trees in October. For venison I prefer to shoot young deer because the meat is more tender and tastes better. I had a group of deer come in to the apples and I picked out what I thought was a first year doe. I purposely picked out this deer from the 5 or 6 others that were there. It was smaller than all of the other deer and had absolutelyNO distinguishable buttons (looked at through binoculars inside of 20 yards). I shot him and watched him go down. Once I got up to him and found it was a button buck I was shocked. I had to press down into the fur on the deer's head to find the buttons. He must have been dropped late.

So while it is usually easy to distinguish there will be those times when it is difficult. I can't remember if that deer's head was rounded or not, but having that information may have helped me avoid that mistake.