Recently I have started hunting in the woods without a bow or a gun. Boiling with mating wood frogs are Vernal pools. Geese are honking all throughout the sky. Trees have not started to bud, thus the sun warms your face.
March is a great season to search for antler sheds and to spend in the forest. I see them nestled under leaves in the woodland duff, standing like a naked stick. I see them in the eye of my imagination. Searching for antler sheds reminds one of an adult Easter egg hunt.
From beige to chocolate, antsons can be many distinct hues. Sometimes they have just one tine protruding or are laying exactly on top of the forest floor. When Buck runs into something or gets hooked on a limb, he typically loses his antlers. One can locate last year’s sheds really difficult. Small animals eat them, and porcupines are particularly tough on them.
Testosterone levels and photoperiods—the length of time sunlight is absorbed—control both the growth and the cast of antlers. An “abscission layer” develops in between the antlers and their pedicels following the rut. The antlers free and fall off as the connective tissue breaks down.
Finding a shed might provide insightful information on the hunting areas for following season. Usually dropped by more mature, dominant bucks (with bigger racks and more depleted testosterone levels), early finds—say in February—usually go away in the middle of March.
First you have to know where the deer lay down, where they roam, and where their food supply comes from. One only learns this by spending time in the forest. Go to the woods, stroll the game paths to the deer bedding and feeding sites after snow covers the ground to learn a lot about their behaviors. You will see how they operate. Deer spend a lot of time in a hard winter sleeping under heavy hemlocks and pines where it is warmer and the snow depth is less. Winter calls for food and cover for deer. Find a corn field still containing some waste corn.
I follow the pathways around Blue Mountain until I come across nearly as well-traveled beaten-down game paths as the Appalachian Trail. I follow them and slow to a meander, dodging under trees like a deer would have to, veering around major blow-downs. I pass a heap of excrement pellets, rubbing on a sapling—the bark absent, the trunk bare and exposed. Deer passed here; perhaps one shed his antlers not too long ago.
I saw where the deer turned over the leaves, moved over the forest floor. Looking for food and minerals, they dug in a clearing. I am extra careful walking a grid plan in these places. Good sites include mature oak ridges with a good acorn harvest remaining under ground. Deer appear to like maple branches, maybe because the flowing sap at this time of year is only somewhat delicious. Signs they are consuming here are nipped off twigs. Rubs show where they mark, not eat. Usually, the buck is larger the larger its buck rub is.
Though they live close to a game route, buck do not always walk one. Though they branch off on their own other times of year, they follow the same paths that the does in the winter. Search the region around a well-traveled path. Once you have a path, they usually stroll on either side.
Out in a sun-drenched, overgrown grass field, I discover little beds that suggest a small deer—maybe a mother and her young. The matted-down beds have deer hairs.Shed hunting would benefit much from dogs. Give your dog a shed to scent before you leave so they know what they should be looking for.
The deer vary their paths as the forest does. Should a large tree fall, the deer roam around it. Usually, they never pass over a tree. If they do not have to, they do not waste their energy. Like a human, a deer usually wants to follow the easiest path available and browse as it goes.
Just sitting in the woods teaches you a lot about wildlife. Your learning increases with increasing time spent there.
Train your eye to see. Parting advice. Never rule anyplace in search of antlers. Consider the necessities of an animal; cover and food will determine where they spend their time. They spend seventy percent of their day there, hence your chances of finding them are good.
Take comfort if you go shed hunting this spring and fail; it happens every year and there is always more to look forward as two inches a day is the fastest growing body part.