ORIGINAL: S-10

PA's buck production has grown leaps and bounds, quantity and quality. If they held the scoring meetings regularly, I would agree with your statement, but they dont. I dont think AR will work everywhere, but in NWPA, it is doing wonders.

Care to point to any documented evidence to back up that statement. Since the buck kill dropped fron 200,000 to 120,000/140/000 including the junior kill the first statement cannot be true and I'am not aware of any proof of the second. I live in NWPA, am in the woods most days and see no huge change in antler devlopment.

South Texas where I'm from Whitetail deer love to forage on the Mesquite bean and prickly pear fruit. They also love corn which is dispensed by feeders to lure deer in. Further north, where oak trees are abundant, deer love to eat acorns.

Folk wisdom holds that South Texas deer have more massive racks where Mesquite and prickly pear are abundant. And according to this bit of folk wisdom, where deer feed on acorns they grow bigger in body size and have smaller racks.

All animals have a genetic potential that is influenced by its environment. Antler development is neither nutritional nor genetic. It is a combination of both

BTW --- deer density of one deer per 10 acres ------ would be 6.4 deer per square mile..

The orginal breeding pens consisted of seven brood bucks, of which six were spikes, and 5 to 7 does. All deer were native Texas whitetails obtained from various locations throughout the State. No additional deer were added after the fall of 1974 and the herd has been maintained as a closed, [pedigreed herd.
The orginal purpose of the pens was to address the following objectives:

• 1. To determine factors which contribute to antler formation in white-tailed deer.
  
• 2. To determine the effect of nutrition level on antler formation and body weight.
  
• 3. To determine if deer that were spike-antlered at 1 1/2-years of age (yearlings) have the same potential for antler development and body weight in later years as bucks which were fork-antlered at 1 1/2 years of age.
  
• 4. To determine the influence of genetics on antler characteristics.

Since 1974, this facility has been used in a series of inter-related research programs to determine the role of nutrition and/or genetics in the antler development process. Although related, each project had its own research design and specific objectives. Due to the large sample sizes and duration of the projects, TPWD has acquired a data set that they believe is unequaled throughout the world.
A total of 2,681 deer have been born in the pens with 474 dams and 138 sires actually used in various studies resulting in 2,219 sets of antlers for analysis. As a result of these studies, several basic principles have been conclusively proven:

• 1. Antler development is genetically based and environmentally influenced.
  
• 2. Antler traits are heritable and passed from parents to offspring.
  
• 3. Yearling antlers are a good indicator of future antler potential.

In the Kerr Wildlife Management Area study, they hand selected the best 15-30% of the yearling bucks produced each year as breed sires. To duplicate this in the wild, 70-85% of your yearling bucks would have to be harvested each year to insure that they did not breed. This large of a yearling buck harvest is unrealistic on very large properties.In the Kerr Wildlife Management Area study, they hand selected the best 15-30% of the yearling bucks produced each year as breed sires. To duplicate this in the wild, 70-85% of your yearling bucks would have to be harvested each year to insure that they did not breed. This large of a yearling buck harvest is unrealistic on very large properties.In the Kerr Wildlife Management Area study, they hand selected the best 15-30% of the yearling bucks produced each year as breed sires. To duplicate this in the wild, 70-85% of your yearling bucks would have to be harvested each year to insure that they did not breed. This large of a yearling buck harvest is unrealistic on very large properties.

In Part 1 of this series I highlighted the work done at the Donnie E. Harmel White-tailed Deer Research Facility at Kerr Wildlife Management Area (WMA) and at Mississippi State University. The research on pedigreed, captive herds at those facilities have yielded somewhat contradictory information about how well we can predict the future antler size based on what a buck looks like as a yearling. Some of this confusion may be due to variation in individual deer performance and differing ways the research projects were designed and executed.
It is clear, however, from a Kerr WMA study where the next generation of sires were selected based on their yearling antler characteristics that a buck’s first set of antlers can be used in predicting his genetic potential in their captive deer herd.
If there are contradictions about the predictability of antler size in controlled, captive situations, that does not bode well for our desire to design deer management schemes around it. In a free-ranging deer population, confounding factors such as fluctuating nutrition, sickness and fawn birth date can interfere with the expression of genes and muddy the issue considerably.
In recent years several studies have been, and continue to be, conducted to determine predictability in the wild. We will explore these studies on free-ranging populations in the next issue and see if any clarity comes from looking at this from the practitioner’s perspective at the population level.

At Kerr Wildlife Management Area, researchers have run selection experiments where they used the largest-antlered yearlings in one trial and the smallest antlered yearlings in another as sire bucks for the next generation of captive deer.
Using the largest-antlered yearlings each year, they successfully increased antler size, by age class, over the course of the experiment. Using the smallest yearlings as sires each year for many years, they were able to nearly breed the antlers off the bucks in that bloodline!