ADWA ACTION ALERT

Join Our Online Community Receive action alerts, tips, news and special offers via e-mail.

Say it ain’t doe!

By TODD FLORY, Salina Journal

CLAY CENTER, Kansas -- Mike Smith, of Clay Center, hopes to one day shoot another deer as rare as the one he downed Dec. 3, but he doubts he'll accomplish the goal.

"I'll probably hunt for the rest of my life and never get anything like that," he said.

Smith, who has hunted for 18 years, shot a 27-point doe last week in Clay County, which is a much higher point total than many sets of antlers. Smith had not checked the monetary value of the rack.

While antlered does are rare, the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks hears of one or two a year.

"The female deer periodically ... will produce antlers," said Lloyd Fox, big game program coordinator for the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks. "We see it once or twice every year in the state, out of 75,000 deer" harvested by hunters.

Smith began hunting at the age of 14, when his mother bought him a bow. However, he was using a .25-06 rifle when he saw the doe from his tree stand 100 yards away.

Smith said he shot the doe in the shoulder, and it ran about 75 yards before falling to the ground.

"I've never shot a non-typical," he said.

Deer can be rated as typical or nontypical. Typical deer have similar points on each side of the rack. Non-typical deer have characteristics such as a larger rack on one side, abnormal points not originating from one of the main antler beams or an antler that grows downward, called a drop tine.

"I've shot several normal deer. That's by far the biggest, inches wise, that I've got so far," Smith said.

Deer racks are measured in squareable inches, the total number of inches from all the points on the rack longer than one inch. Smith's doe had a little over 170 squareable inches of antlers.

Smith had learned from a neighbor that there was a double drop tine deer, one that has antlers growing downward on both sides of the rack, running about, but he didn't know it was a doe. Once Smith found out how rare a doe with non-typical antlers is, he wanted to get the full body of the doe mounted.

"I have a lot of shoulder mounts, but I don't have any full body mounts," he said.

Smith took the doe to his friend Knuth Fengel, of Oak Hill, who does occasional taxidermy work.

"It looked kind of like a freak when we saw it," Fengel said. "I didn't believe him when he called and told me."

Fengel is sending the skin to a tannery and expects to have it back in about five months. From there, he can start mounting the leather skin and head.

"It's your typical deer, just the antlers are misshapen," Fengel said. "I guess it's just unlike anything anybody's seen."

Female deer normally do not grow antlers, Fox said. He believes some grow antlers because of an extra chromosome or some similar genetic defect. He likened it to the abnormality in humans that causes some people to have characteristics of the opposite gender, such as a woman having facial hair.

"These deer will continue to frequently grow these antlers. ... They produce an abnormal amount of points compared to what a normal male would produce," he said.

While Fox hadn't yet seen a photo of Smith's 27-point doe, he knew it was quite rare. With over 170 inches of scoreable inches, Fox said the large antlers for a doe would be much more rare than one in 100,000.

"I haven't ever seen anything that large," he said.