View Article - Arkansas Game and Fish Commission

ARTICLE by RANDY ZELLERSHunting and fishing are so engrainedin people’s lives that three major cablenetworks are devoted to these pursuits.Outdoors enthusiasts are barraged withimages of trophy bucks and hunterstalking in-depth about the massiveantlers of the trophy they just bagged onvideo.These programs are great to pass thetime and get a few pointers, but theycan make the average hunter dismiss ahunting area because a constant parade oftrophy whitetails isn’t beating a trail onopening day.Number CrunchNot everyone in the woods is goingto see a trophy buck before the firstcommercial break. Simply getting a deereach season is much harder than manyshows portray. In fact, it’s almost a coinflip.Roughly 300,000 hunters buy licenseswith deer tags in Arkansas each year.Last year’s harvest, one of the highest onrecord, was 186,168 deer. If each deerwas killed by a different person, morethan 113,000 hunters left the woodswith nothing more than good memoriesof deer camp. Some dedicated or luckyhunters kill a few deer each season, so thechance of a single person taking a deereach season is closer to 50 percent.Although most hunters are interestedin cracking the plus side of the deerharvest, the monster bucks of the mediahave created a sense of antler envy athunting clubs and public hunting areas inArkansas. Good-quality deer sometimesare being ignored, and in some casesridiculed, because they don’t have theantlers of their famous family members.“I’m sure there are some scragglyracks and immature bucks on the privateland you see on television, you just don’tsee that video,” said Dick Baxter, deerprogram coordinator for the ArkansasGame and Fish Commission. “Most ofthose hunts also take place on land that isstrictly managed to keep the ratio of doesto bucks balanced and only harvest olderbucks.”Greener PasturesMany hunters often come home withstories of giant whitetails in states suchas Illinois and Iowa. AGFC biologistsoften are asked to manage Arkansas’sdeer herd identically to those northernstates, but no management plan can beadopted letter-for-letter to achieve thesame results.Baxter says there’s more to Iowa’s bigdeer than a season schedule. Habitat andclimate play a key role in the size of deerand other animals throughout the U.S.,and those are largely out of man’s control.“As you move farther north, animalsof the same species will be larger thantheir southern cousins,” Baxter said.“Iowa’s deer simply grow larger thanthose in Arkansas because of theirsurroundings.”Baxter explained that the differencein size, called Bergmann’s Rule bybiologists, is the result of adapting to coldwinters. The extra size allows for more fatreserves and helps contain body heat.“On average, a deer from Minnesotawill look like a cow when you place itside-by-side with one from Florida, andan Arkansas deer will be somewherein between,” Baxter said. “It’s basicallyevolution at work.”What about Texas? Texas deer tendto be the same size or smaller than onesin Arkansas, so why do they support themassive racks we see on television andhear about from hunters traveling out ofstate?Aside from the television deer andthose taken on strictly controlled areas,which are allowed to grow older beforeharvest, Texas deer are very similar toArkansas deer, but they do have a littleadvantage when it comes to diet.“It’s a matter of minerals in the soilsand the types of vegetation availableto those deer,” Baxter said. “Antlersare about 80 percent protein whilethey are growing. As they harden, thecomposition changes to somethingsimilar to that of bone. Calcium andphosphorus are the two most commonminerals in hardened antlers.”Texas soils tend to hold much morecalcium and phosphorus at the surfacethan soils in Arkansas. This is mostlybecause Texas gets less rain than doesBELOW: This buck has a good start on a high-quality rack at 3½ years old. Relatively few bucks inArkansas make it to this age, much less 5½, when antler growth peaks. Photo by Mike Wintroath.LEFT: Arkansas is capable of producing buckslike this 194 2/8-inch 6½-year-old shot byBrooks Carson of Eads, Tenn., in 2010. Huntersshould realize trophies like this are rarer thanonce in a lifetime. Photo courtesy of BrooksCarson.NOVEMBER • DECEMBER 2011ARKANSAS WILDLIFE11