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Difference in Bucks

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Mike Belt

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A buddy has my camera card so no pics here yet but last week I got a pic of one of the biggest muscled up buck I've ever had. The camera was set up over a scrape with a series of scrapes close by. I got several deer (bucks and does) but I had 2 bucks that were legal shooters. One was a bad pic of a deer running by the scrape at night and never looking towards the scrape. Rackwise he looked to be a 130-135 class buck but also looked like he had lost much of his weight and all of his muscle tone. The other buck rackwise was just a 4 pointer with pretty good mass but nothing spectaculat about his antlers. He worked the scrape so I got lots of angles on the pics. He looked to be 5.5 or older. His muscle tone was outstanding. His neck looked like a barrel stuck on his body and his hams and shoulders would place him in the Atlas catagory. The thing that amazed me was you have 2 bucks in the same immediate area, both evidently participating in the rut, and there looked to be a 75 pound difference in them having basically the same body frame. How could one buck this late into the breeding season be so muscled up and the other so worn down unless the larger one has just started?
 
Not all older bucks participate in the rut. Not all bucks are successful breeders. Some bucks may be spending all their time pursuing and competing for does (and burning off body weight) while other bucks of the same age may be only half-heartedly pursuing does and not competing at all, burning off little weight.
 
BSK said:
Not all older bucks participate in the rut. Not all bucks are successful breeders. Some bucks may be spending all their time pursuing and competing for does (and burning off body weight) while other bucks of the same age may be only half-heartedly pursuing does and not competing at all, burning off little weight.
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Exactly!
 
Do you think it's possible that my older buck (we'll call him Atlas) isn't participating in the rut? He certainly doesn't look like he is from his weight and muscle tone. If this is the case do you think it's possible that there are bucks like Atlas that participate in the scraping and signposting only as a means of territorial display and nothing to do with breeding? With bucks on the move and new "rangers" coming into his area even if he isn't a breeder he may be hitting the scrapes trying to intimidate any breeder bucks working those scrapes. I guess I never thought about it before even though I knew there were bucks that didn't participate in the rut. I took it for granted that by not participating they also probably didn't do any scraping, etc.
 
I believe some bucks do little chasing or actual breeding. Scraping and rubbing are so instinctive that most bucks proabably participate in these activities even if they are not aggressive breeders.

A theory even exists than many of the wildly non-typical bucks (have many non-typical tines) do little breeding as seeing these bucks late in the season with broken tines/antlers is quite rare.
 
Mike Belt said:
The other buck rackwise was just a 4 pointer with pretty good mass but nothing spectaculat about his antlers. He worked the scrape so I got lots of angles on the pics. He looked to be 5.5 or older.
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I have never seen or heard of a 5.5yr old 4 pt. I would love to see the pics of the two deer.
 

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