This year I am seeing a lot of spike and fork horn yearling bucks on my property. I can't understand why there are so many, I'm used to seeing yearling bucks with 6-8 point basket racks. There is plenty of food and good nutrition around this year and last year. So why aren't the bucks growing the typical basket racks?
depands on when the does came into heat. if they came late last year, you will have more smaller racks.
JM...I had this same problem the last few years here in Western IL. My take was Too Many Does...I'm totally surrounded by outfitters and know that for a few years running only a few bucks were taken from surrounding properties and no does. Too many does mean more does not being bred on first or second estrus cycle - meaning later born fawns and smaller racks that first year. One sit last year I had 3 spikes walk single file by my stand...up until a few years ago I had never seen a spike (back when the farm families still hunted the properties and shot any deer they could). We have since stepped up the doe harvest (10 last year on just our 65 acres)...I have this year only seen 3 spike/fork/3-4pt bucks...and have seen 2 yearling 10 points. I could be way off - but 10 years ago when many more deer where harvested off neighboring properties - yearling bucks had better racks, and I saw more mature bucks than today...I feel some properties have too many deer currently in my parts. ...but I could be dead wrong
I would say no and no to both of those questions, having hunted John's property the last two years... and we had some of the hardest winters ever as wel with all the ice storms around here. Maybe we can take some late-season does off it
There is a fair amount of deer but I wouldn't call it over populated. The last couple of winters haven't been too bad, but no stressfull times during the summer, plenty of rain and good crops during antler growing season.
I had this same situation last year. Everyone told me It was just late born fawns from the year before. Who knows I guess.
I wouldn't get overly worried about it.... I remember reading a research article a few years back about antler growth, whether people should try and cull spikes, etc. Whole point of the read was that tagged animals that were late bloomers (spikes etc) grew to be the same size as their early bloomer counter parts when they reached maturity - on average at least....
I stopped trying to figure out why some years you see more spike-ish bucks & other years bigger yearlings. It never panned out with previous mild winters or mast crops. Heck up until recently this past season, in 2+ years of hunting Ohio I had something like 10 of 12 bucks seen we spike-type bucks, the other 2 were shooters. NOTHING in between. Then finally one day this year I saw a handful of non-spike but non-shooter bucks. I still see a ton of very small racked 1.5 yr olds over there.
Not so much this year for me, but in years past I have seen alot of Spikes and fork horns. The year after the EHD outbreak I was seeing button bucks like mad, they were everywhere.
