Interesting. History of a deer is important in management of middle-aged to older age bucks.

Little bit of luck in everything!

Too many variables, with timely rain being the biggest.

I would be interested in seeing some data on age class of 3-5 yrs old bucks with scores by year with rainfall data from those years. I am interested in how the rut effects bucks in those age classes.

Since they do the most covering I'd imagine there'd need to be ratio data as well.

On some of the ranches they have accurate ratio data in the research areas.

Trap all the fawns and DNA test them.

They are looking at things backwards... if you are working on looking at individuals you can't bring them back to compare them all as one in an average...

The study looks to me like it takes a whole lot of time discussing what individual deer did... without bringing in a whole lot of why.

Those of us that have been managing for individuals forever have seen lots and lots of reasons for big jumps and big fall offs...

We've seen out of the blue drop offs and out of the blue "pops"

We know what shape is most likely to stall and what shape is most likely to blow up...

We know that rutting hard can wear a big buck down.

We know about the 4-5-6 sideways slide that means a lot of big deer don't get that much bigger from one year to the next in inches... because frame gets bigger and points get shorter... but the best deer pop out of it.

We know about illnesses that deer can luck out of and come back to normal...

We know about 10+" extra beam points caused by antler damage that are never going to come back...

We know about or suspect stress levels of individuals allowing them to get bigger...

We know about individuals losing their dominance in a set of deer... causing increased or decreased size...

etc etc etc...

I didn't see a whole lot of that in this thing.

Interesting read.

How would you explain deer that are bigger at 9&10 than they were 5-7?

I've heard it can happen. I don't let them many live that long and haven't seen it. If you read the article they took him out of a non-fed enclosure... and fed him...

Deer are as good as their teeth. I have a 16 or 17 year old at the house... but he looks it...

My findings are that you really have a window from 5-8+ to try to match rain with your biggest deer... so you have the ability to leave them...

The only problem with that is... you are running a pretty significant death loss risk for that individual to allow him to live through the rut and try to come out the back side in the 7+'s... so is it worth it?

If he has taken a 40 inch hit... then yeah it probably is...

If he has the potential to be 30+ inches bigger and he is already 200... depends on what you already have hanging on the wall or sitting in the bank account.

That's the trend I'm seeing in deer that manage to slip through the cracks and reach those ages. Had one this past year that had been an 8 since '08 (deformed 1 yr and 7 the following) go up to 10. Our deal though is that the switch flips between 4 & 5 that makes the nocturnal so it's not a matter of letting them reach those ages, more a matter of actually seeing them.

Good read. I've seen several instances where the buck grew his largest antler set at 4 1/2 years old

One was mid 170's at 4 and he never got out of the 150's after that. No protein and drought conditions played a role