Roe doe with antlers ?!?

270Buck

Well-Known Member
This has already been posted in the general discussions but with the advice from Morena I have posted it on the Deer Welfare section.

I was sat my 2 man highseat this morning with one of my friends. In the half light and fog we could make out 2 roe deer about 150 yards away.

Whilst we were waiting for them to come closer a cock pheasant flew out of the cover with a vixen in hot pursuit. She stopped long enough for me to drop her on the spot about 40 yards from the foot of the seat.

The deer we had been watching stayed stood exactly where they were, seemingly unperturbed by the shot. After another very cold 20 minutes they both very slowly passed the seat 96 yards ahead of us. It was a very old adult doe and this years buck youngster. She was a good animal to take, I shot her broadside with a predictably good reaction to the shot. She ran 50 yards into the cover, with the youngster making its way a further 200 yards or so into the copse. We sat and had a cup of coffee, before we went to retrieve the fox to be later burnt in the incinerator.

We found the .270 130 grain sierra gameking boatailed bullet strike. There was good signs of bright red blood with pieces of lung and white foam, we easily walked through the still heavily frozen cover and found the doe. I dragged her out onto the open ground. When I was about to start gralloching her I noticed some small 1" long buttons exactly where the pedicles would be on a buck?

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I have kept the head and will boil it out properly and see what it looks like under the fur.

When she was weighed in with hocks off and head on she was 51lb.

She had an amazing amount of fat surrounding the kidneys, more than I have seen on any deer, including big red stags and fallow bucks.

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I know it has been documented before with roe deer but I am wondering if anyone else has also shot or seen a doe or hind, of any species with any signs of antlers.

To top the morning off, after I had gralloched the doe we look out across the open field and spotted a dog fox. I made my way through the cover and laid prone using my bipod took the fox at 130 yards straight in the boiler room. When we got up to it, it had one of the landlord’s English partridge in its mouth! He was very pleased when I turned up in the yard with the bag from the morning. :D :D :D
 
what can i say
never seen an antlered doe on my ground to date , will certainly make a good talking point for the future :)
any chance of posting a few more pics than what you hav done already in the trophy room of this unusuall specimen
or will we hav to wait till the taxidermist has finished
pm sent about posting pics
 
Thanks to r.atkinson he has posted a photo of a roe doe developing pedicles.
To give an explanation need to give antler development in the male first.
Roe male kids develop pedicles as they come to puberty. The development is induced by increasing plasma levels of testosterone.
All bone is covered by a layer of cells known as periosteum.
On the frontal bone of the skull there is a region of periosteum overlying it known as the ANTLEROGENIC periosteum. What this means the cells in this area have the potential to develop into pedicles and subseqently form antlers. The cells retain the ability to develop into velvet, cartilage, blood vessels and finally bone.
Now does retain this ability as well.In the male the first antler develops as the testosterone levels are falling. remember the pedicle develops with rising testosterone then falls initiating antler growth. Seasons.
There is growing evidence that in both males and females testosterone affects the skeleton indirectly after local conversion to oestrogen by an enzyme called AROMATASE.
Thus in does that grow antlers there is an imbalance of oestrogen/testosterone due to ? adrenal dysfunction due to cells or tumour producing ANDROGENS precursors of testosterone mimicking substances.
Antlers actually develop under the influence of oestrogens and only mineralise ( harden ) as the testosterone levels increase. When this level falls the pedicles/antler junction loose their calcium content and are cast. the top of the pedicle then swells and a velvet like skin covers the wound and a new set of antlers star growing underneath.
When a doe develops antlers are these fully mineralised (hardened ) as this requires rapid rapidly rising testosterone levels, is she capable of carrying young ? Finding corpora lutea without foetus merely indicates that she has ovulated. Always bear in mind that does are mooestrous ( in season once ) and form corpora lutea whether they are pregnant or not.
A difficult area to be specific as only isolated caes occur,short of live capture and blood tests we wont know precisely. The more field observations we make the more chance we have of unravelling it.
 
Morena,

mudman has posted on the other thread and sounds like he has got a better example than mysef.

I finally got round to boiling mine out.

It is being bleached as I type this.

I will post some photo's tomorrow.

Kind regards,

r
 
Photo's as promised

This has been very interesting to find there are more of these antlered does being recorded.

As promised please see the photo's of the head boiled out.

In a way it woud have been interesting to shoot this doe closer to the end of the season to see if the antlers woud have developed any more.

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I've shot quite a few does like this over the years, most of them in Argyll we were shooting around 300 does pa. so I suppose statistically we would see a few, unfurtunately we never kept a note of them, it was just one of those things :eek: as far as i can remember they were always in good enough condition also 1 in poland and 1 in germany on those ocasions it was a real talking point.
I also saw 1 in Aberdeenshire , the underkeeper thought it was a yearling buck :confused:
This is the first time I've had an explanation, thankyou :D
 
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