Age

I just got the tooth aging report back from our 2006 antelope. There were a few surprising things to me:

We had 4 of the bucks from our ranch near Roy, NM aged and all of them were very young - 2, 2, 3, and 4 years old. This is probably because this was our first year on the ranch and, in the past, this ranch was usually hunted very hard. We took over the lease last season and cut the tags back substantially. Hopefully this will allow the bigger bucks to live longer and have a better chance at passing on their big horn genetics to the future antelope.

We found a good buck in Unit 10 and gave away the location to a friend who drew a Unit 10 tag. The buck wound up scoring 90 5/8 SCI and was aged at ONLY 2 years old! This is very interesting and may be one of only a few bucks to ever break 90 inches as a 2 year old. Makes me kinda mad that we didn't wait another year or two to see just how big this buck could have gotten.

The largest buck we took last year, according to horn mass, weighed in at 462 grams for each horn. This buck scored 96 6/8 SCI and 92 B&C. It was aged at only 3 years old. We have video of the buck from the year before and thought the buck was "only" an 85-86 inch (B&C) buck. That's a lot of growth in one year.

My 87 SCI buck from Wyoming last year was aged at only 2.

On the other end of the spectrum - Jeff Mott's buck from Unit 7 that scored 87 3/8 SCI was aged at 6 years old. This makes perfect sense as the buck's horns were very uneven from side to side and this, as far as we can tell, is a trait relegated mostly to older bucks.

Three of the four Arizona bucks that were submitted for aging came back as very old bucks - 4, 9, 9, and 9 years old. I don't know the scores of these bucks but I'd guess that they were long and thin with short (possibly high) prongs.

On another note - Blake Lanoue of Arizona Outfitters just started up our "Early Photos" thread on AZOD's chat forum for this year and posted a few pictures of a growing buck. I'll be posting pictures to that thread as well as soon as I start my scouting and take some good pictures.

Check it out if you get a chance - and better yet, post some photos!

Tally Ho!