BSK, I'm interested in how those average scores play out. For example, let's say that there are three 4.5 year old bucks. Are they all more likely to be within a few inches of scoring 120 or will one be a stud, one well below average, and one fairly close to 120? In other words, how wide a variety can we expect to see in antler size among each age class?
You are correct LenS, they are widely scattered. Every age-class of buck in a given location (beyond yearlings) will display a massively wide bell-curve distribution. In fact, on most properties, the full range for any single age exceeds 100 inches. That means there's going to be a 2 1/2 that scores 30 and a 2 1/2 that exceeds 130. The same goes for each age-class. In addition, on just about any property I've collected enough data on, I'll find that the highest scoring yearling buck is larger than the lowest scoring mature buck. This is why antler restrictions don't work well. Yes, there are averages, and 2/3 of the bucks in a given age will be within + or - "X" inches of that average, but you still have a lot of bucks of that age that are way above and way below the average. And this is critical,
all ages have overlap in their bell-curve distribution. In essence, the upper end of one age is way up into the curve of the next age. This means a buck's antler score cannot be used to determine his age. You can have a yearling scoring 80, and 2 1/2, 3 1/2, 4 1/2, and 5 1/2+ year-old bucks also scoring 80.
However, there are some interesting differences once you start looking at data from big agricultural areas. First, the right hand side of the curve (the higher scores) get stretched far higher than in other areas. In essence, there's going to be those few truly monstrous bucks in each-class, but they are the exception. In addition, the left-hand side of the curve (the lower scores) are often "truncated," meaning there aren't many bucks of a given age that are extremely low scoring. I took a look at the photo census data from a trophy managed property in southern Illinois, and although the averages for mature bucks were nowhere near as high as hunters assume it would be, there were those individual bucks that were WAY up at the right-hand side (VERY high scoring). And there were very few that were exceptionally small. Basically, they didn't have any mature bucks under about 110 gross, the average was not as high as most would assume, but there WERE those couple of mature bucks that were monsters.
