The life of the wood, meadow, and lake go on without us. Flowers bloom, set seed and die back; squirrels hide nuts in the fall and scold all year long; bobcats track the snowy lake in winter; deer browse the willow shoots in spring. Humans are but intruders who have presumed the right to be observers, and who, out of observation, find understanding.

~Ann Zwinger

I am familiar with the behavior of male White-tailed deer (bucks) during the breeding season (the rut) – they don’t eat much, they are challenging (often with antler to antler struggles) other bucks in the area for dominance and the opportunity to mate with the females that come into estrus, they chase females, and they tend to lose much of their wariness. All this generally occurs in the Fall, usually peaking in early November in our woods. There is a phenomenon called the second rut that can happen when some females that did not mate successfully come into estrus 30 days or so after the first rut is complete, usually in January.

But my trail cameras picked up a spate of antler testing behavior running through the month of February. I’m not sure what is happening, but maybe it is just “boys being boys”. They have formed some bachelor groups that hang out together through much of the day and night and it seems that after dark they like to test their strength by pushing and shoving a bit. The more evenly matched they are, the better the show, but I do admire one buck that just has nubs for antlers that tries to enter the fray to show his toughness.

I have not seen any of this activity during daylight hours (though the cameras do pick up buck hanging out together) and there seems to be a preference for performing these feats of buck showmanship at the cameras located on the creek. Here are some highlights of bucks doing their thing (volume up)…

— When the largest local buck is involved, it is usually a fairly short display of buck fever

— Two bucks pushing each other in the creek

— Two bucks really going at it

— A third buck with barely any antlers wants to join the fray, but the other two bucks seem a bit tangled up

— Three nice bucks strutting their stuff

They seem to have tired of this showmanship with the onset of March. Perhaps it is related to the fact that the first week of March caught the first image of a buck that has dropped an antler.

— Antler shedding has started. New growth will start soon.

The cameras picked up this behavior on several nights, with these bouts often lasting many minutes. There was lots of maneuvering, some pawing of the ground, and plenty of head fakes and false starts to go along with the energetic pushing and clacking of antlers. There is so much happening in our woods after dark. As of this week, the largest bucks are still holding onto their complete antler set, but it won’t be for long. Now, if only I can find some antler sheds.