Some of you may have seen my post at BTC, but I thought I would share it here as well.
Here are some pics that I took of one messed up buck a few years ago. He had so many problems that I don't really know where to start. I guess I will start at the ground and work my way up. Sometime in this bucks life he lost the lower half of his left hind leg. By the jagged but worn smooth bone, to me, it looks like it was snapped off just below the tarsal gland.
I have seen other critters (bear & elk) with missing legs and usually they are worn smooth with leather like scars, but this one was different. This buck had a plum sized cyst or tumor of some sort off to one side of the break. I was going to cut it in half and take a look, but it just didn't sound good at the time.
From the broken leg we move on to the teeth.
Talk about a needing braces. Blacktails typically have 8 incisor teeth. This buck had 6 and they were not in a nice even row. They had gaps, angled in different directions and two of them were pointed like canines. I wish I had taken a look at the upper pallete to see if it was scared or affected by the sharp / crooked teeth.
Now onto his rack.
What a crazy looking set of antlers. His left side has 4 typical points as well as an eyeguard, but on the back side of the main beam it also has a couple of small kickers plus a small kicker between the back forks as if trying to crown. 8 points of some sort or another on the left side.
The right antler was all sorts of twisted. There are two main points with an eye guard and on the back of the beam where it should have forked there is a small blade like kicker. Just below the fork there is a knot and that is about where the forks start twisting.The pictures don't really show it, but they are twisted almost parrallel to the ears. There were 4 points of some sort on the right side.
I have heard that if a deer or elk has trauma on one side of the body it can affect the opposite side. I am not a biologist, but it seems to ring true in this case. Lower left leg missing = crazy right antler?
And last but not least the lead poisoning that killed him.
If you didn't notice in the frontal pic, this buck took a shot in the nose. The slug went through the nasal passage, through the brain and exited the skull, but stayed in the hide. We cut the hide back to get the slug, then cut the skull cap with a saw. We only needed to cut from the back of the brain cavity to almost the front before we ran out of bone. The rest we cut with a knife.
