i know theres a picture in one of the bigbuck mags from last year or the year before of one

I took a nice buck last year in Alberta and the outfitter swares its a cross breed ...

dd

I bow to what others say, especially Brutal Attack, technically they do interbreed occasionally. But I personally think it's damned rare, in the herds I hunt.

I think the incidence of interbreeding get wildly exaggerated.Some guy sees a whitetail with a sticker point off a tine, and yup that there's one of them crossbreeds.

I hunt an area with a true intermix of whitetails and muleys out in eastern MT. Right now, after a rough winter in '03/'04 its 2:1 muleys to whitetails. Before that, it was 1:1. The deer intermix, but with whitetails tending to be closer to alfalfa fields and muleys a little more toward the rough broken country. It's pretty clear whitetails take priority. They take the prime habitat and the muleys fill in around the edges.

Ihave watched rutty muley bucks approach whitetail does with sex on the brain, then turn off when they see it's a whitetail. I've watched the same show with a rutty whitetail buck, and he'll alsoturn and go away. I've seen near-fights between muley and whitetail bucks, but I've never seen crossbreeding or any deer that looked like a cross. I don't doubt that once every decade somebody gets his wires crossed and humps the wrong doe, but it's really not worth all the time some people spend talking about it.

Just my opinion, applied only to the areas I hunt.

I deal alot with hybrids of other species in my work andalot of times a certain animal may actually be a hybrid but exhibit 90%-99% of the characteristics of one species or the other. This makes visual assessment of hybrids very difficultand often times an animal may actually be a hybrid but look almost 100% like a whitetail or a muley without DNA testing. So my point is there may be many more hybrids out there than you think they just don't look like it.

here is a deer that looks like one(my first actually)...taken from a known hybrid place. however the rancher sez they usually have whitetail tails...this one didn't

Nice buck. Not wanting to be argumentative, but your picture illustrates my point about how people call deer hybrids with very little rationale for it. I don't see that deer as a hybrid. That's a muley buck that just didn't fork his back tines.

I have heard that Whitetail bucks breed mulie does but not vice versa.....

I have to agree with Dirt2. That's a great buck mewlie, but it looks like to me like a 100% mule deer that's G2s don't bifurcate. I grew up in Eastern Montana andI've seen countless thousands of deer in areas where both species overlap. I've never seen a single one that looked in any way shape or form like a hybrid. Then again I've never seen a wild mountain lion either, but I'm pretty sure they exist.

AK Jeff

agree also, the lack of brow tines says a lot, also lack of beading.

Does anybody know if the muletail hybrids are sterile? My guess is that they are, but I have no real info on which to base that presumption.