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Shed Antler HuntingI was one of those "in the shed guys", but I never really forgot about them. Back in the early eighties I stumbled upon one half of an eight point rack that was much bigger than anything that I had ever shot. It did intrigue me enough that I held onto it, and stuck it in a shed back home. My shed antler hunting didn’t start until about 15 years later. When our buck population recovered in the late nineties, we started finding an occasional antler around our deer feeders. Since then, shed antler hunting is something that we do a little of each winter. The only problem that we have had is that we generally do not find antlers when we are looking for them. We just happen upon them as opposed to actually finding them when we're hunting them. I would like to tell you about some methodical system that we use for shed antler hunting, but our success when hunting them is not that good. The best antler I have found to date was discovered in a hayfield one winter while we were removing fallen trees from the edge of a hayfield. It was one half of an eight point that I had watched and photographed the previous season. It was neat to have the shed and to actually hold onto it and see how big it was. One of the interesting things about this shed is that it is very similar to the shed that I had found some 15 years earlier, and it is the opposite side. If you hold them up, they would form a very nice, fairly symmetrical rack. In recent years I have a few bucks that I have seen while hunting, caught by digital scouting camera and found one of its shed antlers. Maybe the accomplishments that I should be most proud of, is finding a set of shed spikes. Now these little things are truly needles in a haystack. One year my son, a neighbor and I were shed antler hunting in the woods near one of our feeders when I looked at the ground near our neighbor’s feet. Sure enough he was standing in between two shed spikes. One year my son was running through one of our food plots and tripped over a shed antler. We’ll take them any way we can find them. We’ve found that it is beneficial to be aware of your surroundings whenever you are in the woods through the winter and spring months. You never know when you may happen int a shed antler. Our neighbor found the shed antlers in the picture below. They are from the biggest 8 point that was on our property. We called him double white throat patch. You can see what he looked like when he was wearing them on the Whitetail Deer Photographs Page. He was a regular on our digital scouting camera later in the fall.
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