Good morning. Today is New Years Eve and it finds me at my cabin again. Because of circumstances at home we haven't been here for 2 months. Not much has changed, except the snow is much deeper. Deer are abundant, as always. We got here Friday after noon, and after unpacking I went out to put out some feed. My neighbor has been feeding them alphalpa bails and there were a couple of does out back. It only took 3 or 4 minutes after out put out some food that bucks started showing up. It's been a constant parade of different bucks. Yesterday, my wife and I drove to the store to pick up some essentials and about 1/2 mile from the cottage a buck crossed the road. It was a big deer and something looked odd about his antlers. It appeared that one of his antlers was broken off. After we got back I was doing some chores in the yard and deer started showing up. Sure enough the one with the broken antler was with them. This is the first time I've seen this deer. He was or used to be a good 4 x 4 but the main beam was broken off right in front of his G3. Picture to follow. At this time there were 6 - 7 deer, all bucks, at the feeder. The one with the broken antler is the biggest deer of the bunch and the most dominant and got first pickings. The second largest deer had dropped his antlers and was now defenseless and even the smallest deer, a yearling spike, put the run on him. This morning I looked out and there was a deer waiting in the dark. The feeder was empty so I hurried out and got some in a pail. The deer stepped aside to allow me to pour the feed into the feeder. As soon as that was done, he started chowing down. This was a nice 5 x 5 and is the same deer that appears in my avatar. I did get some pictures and got a reasonably good one of the deer with the broken antlers and here it is.
