Buck up!

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Our weirdo resident buck never lost his antlers this winter.

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And in all the decades we’ve been hosting backyard deer, that’s never happened.

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Makes me wonder why…

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And hope nothing is wrong.

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It looks rather painful.

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They stomp at us all the time.

I’ve spoken deer for years…

😉

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18 thoughts on “Buck up!”

  1. When I was living in Minnesota we had a buck who would regularly invaded our bird feeder (he actually broke one by hitting it and shaking the seeds out) and who also had these weird looking antlers. It bugged me to see his twisty antlers every morning, so I called the state office of wildlife and asked if they knew what caused this. (This was pre-internet, pre-Google, so we actually had to call for information on our landline.) The patient man who answered said there was a kind of bone disease that causes the antlers to break off and grow in unnatural directions, kind of like toenail virus except on horns. He said it didn’t bother the deer, but if the antlers started curling in towards the face and particularly the eyes and mouth, we (my intensely curious kids and I) should call again and they’d send a couple of field workers to catch the deer and saw them off. Otherwise, let nature take its course, which sounds terrible: but the wildlife expert said there were plenty of deer who didn’t have helpful humans watching after them and who lived with the condition…until they didn’t. Nature isn’t always nice.

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