Well it looks like my mule deer buck is going to be my entry into the contest. I shot an older deer this weekend but it isn't going to score very much at all.
I'm pretty sure I have 3 years worth of trail camera picture of this guy and am guessing his age at 7 1/2 years old based on his jawbone. I did a crappy job of getting good pictures of him as it was after dark by the time I was able to get out of my stand and go get him and I was by myself.
Here he is hanging.
The first odd thing about this buck was that the broken right antler was completely dettached from his skull plate. I'm pretty sure that it was broken 3 years ago and since it was dettached from his skull plate he never was able to drop that antler and grow another. It never turned white, but it does look like it has been hanging on there for several years.
Here is a picture after I skinned his head -
http://padens.com/v-web/gallery/albu...ck_skinned.jpg
I'm just going to link it since it might be considered a little graphic. Kind of hard to tell, but when I skinned it, the antler was completely dettached and meat had grown all around where it had broken. It wasn't much of a jigsaw puzzle because enough bone was missing that it didn't fit back on the skull plate anywhere.
Here's his jawbone.
I have the jawbone of the buck I shot last year that was aged by the lab with cementum annuli at 8 1/2 and based on that jawbone and the trail camera pictures I'm fairly confident this buck was 7 1/2. I'm going to go ahead and send the lower incisors off to get aged anyway. I'm starting to collect some pretty impressive jawbones though!
The buck weighed in at 162lbs on the hoof which was 10lbs lighter than the 8 1/2 year old I shot last year. This guy had some heavy tarsal staining and looked like he was about to get going with the rut right around the corner here. I did get some good video footage of him before I decided to go ahead and take him, if I figure out how to get that uploaded I'll do that. My Sony video camera has a wierd codec and it is a pain to resize and upload.
The last thing that was interesting was that his right shoulder was fused to his vertebrae with some VERY thick cartilidge that was almost as hard as a bone. I had to hack at it pretty hard to get the shoulder off. I should have taken some pictures of it but didn't. When I butchered him, his shoulder muscles were developed a little differently than you would think. I didn't spend a whole lot of time analyzing it, just enough to know that it wasn't exactly normal and I assumed it was related to the shoulder being fused to the vertebrae.
Putting it all together I'm wondering if this guy got hit by a car on his right side or something. I just don't think his antler could have been broken off inside his head like that from fighting and that would explain the shoulder too.
Not a trophy that is going to end up on my wall, but a very unique buck that I was proud to harvest. I don't even know how you would begin to actually score something like him.
I'll get the mule deer entered into the contest shortly. I rescored him and he shrunk a tiny bit or I was overly optimistic the first time I measured him on the tailgate but he is 180 2/8 now. The main difference was that I didn't realize that your spread credit is limited to the length of the longest main beam. His inside spread is 24" but his longest main beam is only 22 3/8" so he only gets credit for 22 3/8" for his spread. Adjusting it down by 14% for the whitetail comparison and he will score 155" for the contest.
Nathan