Hybrid talk from biggest buck thread

[boneaddict]

Those damn big whitetails

[TeacherMan]

That is a tank!!!

[kentrek]

That is my kind of whitetail

[kodiak06]

Couple more pics...I will say after hunting this buck a couple days he was extremely aggressive and was pushing out full framed 180 type deer

looks like 100% mule deer to me.

me too

[C-Money]

Couple more pics...I will say after hunting this buck a couple days he was extremely aggressive and was pushing out full framed 180 type deer

looks like 100% mule deer to me.

me too

As deep as his chest is, and the ripped muscles in his neck, I bet he was pushing everyone around! Wow...looks like buffalo genetics observing width/depth of chest!

[C-Money]

This whitetail forks, but I don't see a drop of muley blood. Antlers are just not a good indicator to me of a deers breed. This whitetail came from our farm, which has a very healthy population of mule deer and whitetail deer. I just don't think cross breeding happens a lot.

[C-Money]

This muley came from a friends farm...This deer gets accused of being a whitetail a lot. Probably a benchleg, but no whitetail blood that I could see from his physical features.

[zwickeyman]

Antler shape is the worst way to tell if Whitey or Muley

Tail
Face
Ears
Belly       Are all betters ways

[MeepDog]

Antler shape is the worst way to tell if Whitey or Muley

Tail
Face
Ears
Belly       Are all betters ways

It seems like the mule deer in areas with heavy overlap of whitetails are muddy. Areas like the blues foothills have mule deer that have thick bases to their tails with brown all the way down the tail, and smaller ears. In the juniper dunes, the deer look like dumbo with giant ears and their tails are small and more rope like. I'm not saying I know for certain that the thick tailed small eared muleys are hybrids, but maybe their great great grandpappy did some kanoodling with the neighboring herd of whitetails.

[KP-Skagit]

In college I was down on the Snake River breaks and glassed a herd of mulies with several bucks. One had a decidedly whitetail rack in form and much lighter antler color than every other buck in the group.

What was interesting was the group got spooked and took off. They all bounded off except the unique buck, he ran almost as if he couldn't decide whether to bound like a mule deer or sprint like a whitetail. It was very strange. Can't remember if it lifted its tail been a while now. Wasn't till then I started thinking it was a cross.

Over the years I have heard others mention "hybrids" don't know how to run.

Curious if others have since stories to tell?

[chukardogs]

 I hadn't thought much about this until this conversation. In the late 80s, I hunted a bowl like landscape with a ridge that wrapped around leaving only the east facing plateau open to drop into a creek valley with a 3200 ft. elavation. The most western portion of the ridge was 5000 ft. elevation with the ridge (s) as it/they wrapped around both north and south and ran east, dropped to 4000 ft. elevation before eventually running down into the valley to the east. I hunted a few bruiser Whitetails and eventually killed my biggest Whitetail just below one of the 4000 ft. peaks and chased a couple monster Muleys for a few years just below and around the 5000 ft. peak to the west. During the Modern Firearm season, I never saw a Whitetail above the 4000 ft. elevation of the bowl and I never saw a Muley below the 4600 ft. elavation. I see basically the same situation where I hunt now. Until the fires of 2015 we'd never seen a Whitetail above the 4600 ft. elevation. That year after the fires, we had Whitetails running around our camp at 5400 ft. Since 2015, haven't seen another.
 My point, which I assume some would like me to get to, in a natural setting with no feed plots or human inhabitants, unless weather, snow or fires drive the species together, for whatever reason, whether it's intentional or just a natural consequence of the species environmental preferences, they do a pretty good job of staying away from one another.

[chukardogs]

What an interesting dynamic. Because the two species run so differently, a hybrids natural tendencies could be conflicted. That'd be a hard one to hit on the run!

[OutHouse]

Several years ago there was an impressively big bodied (apparent) whitetail that I saw in Gardner unit. The antlers were more impressive than the body and the tips pointed out. A few times I got a good look at the buck close up from a road and when he turned his head many of the tines were forked just like a mule deer with a wide rack with the tips pointing out. It had a normal tail for a whitetail. Ears were not over sized. Overall, the rack looked much more like a mule deer than a whitetail. Its interesting because I posted a smaller basket buck on here sometime in the 2014 or 2015 time frame and there were comments that it may have been a cross.

[boneaddict]

What an interesting dynamic. Because the two species run so differently, a hybrids natural tendencies could be conflicted. That'd be a hard one to hit on the run!

Actually one of the reasons if hybridization does manage to come about, the animals have poor survival rates.   Hybrids move in a way that is not quite whitetail but not quite mule deer either.  This combined style of movement, however, doesn’t compound effectiveness at escaping predators, it reduces their ability to escape.

As stated and as shown, antlers are very poor characteristics for judging hybrids.  Metatarsal glands would be one of the best without a laboratory at least. 

[kirkl]

Heres a west Yakima buck I shot quit awhile ago. Whitey frame.