I was bored & organizing trail cam photos of this season so far and noticed something funny. I've mentioned before about how the deer around this area of TN are weencie teencie tiny but never felt I could fully convey what I meant because they just look like deer in pictures. Best I can describe them is they're nearly identical to the coues deer out west. No idea the cause of the phenomena. I've heard conflicting reasoning from reliable sources and I'm not sure who's right. One camp says they're coastal deer brought in and released on nearby AEDC for reintroduction some decades ago. The other camp says it's impossible for the reintroduction deer to still be around because generations of interbreeding would have washed out any discernible differences. Whatever the reason, there are indeed tiny deer here. Go 20 miles any direction and they seem to get back to normal size, and ever so often I also get one of the normal sized deer coming around the property but I've never seen them mingling with the small deer nor had them in trail cam pics that showed the difference. But I do now. Here's a few set of pics that show what I usually see around here and for comparison a normal size deer on same camera.
This first set of pics is a tiny deer on July 30th then a normal deer 1st August. Both bucks are similar stature, standing in similar spots, but one is obviously much larger in every way. Proportions are same but scale is different.
This second set of pics is a bachelor group of bucks to show it's not just an oddball tiny deer. They're all like that. And again standing in similar location and similar angle is the normal buck, also roughly same age as small buck with stretched out neck. I don't get a normal size deer very often and almost never get them in a situation like this so it's cool when I can visually compare their pics side by side with the oompa loompas.
And these last few pics are of my first velvet hunt......but don't laugh. I'd had a nice 10pt on cam all summer that had a full pretty rack that was out well past his ears and beams out to tip of nose, symmetrical minus one stumped brow. Keep in mind I'm from Ohio so up to this hunt I was relating a 10pt buck out past his ears with a 200lb+ animal that would easily bust the P&Y threshold. There was a big tall 8pt running with him so my brother came down from Ohio to hunt with me in hopes we'd double up on what would be either of our first velvet bucks. We looked at dozens of trail cam pics of both bucks and agreed they were shooters. Well as luck would have it I got a shot on the 10. As we walked up to see the dead buck my brother burst out into hysterical laughter. He'd never seen such a miniature buck and didn't know something like that even existed. In trail cams it looked like a full grown buck. But in person it was about like a medium dog. He took a picture of me as I was picking its head up and I dwarf that buck. My bow was literally longer than the deer's body. For scale those arrows in the quiver are 29" long.
This first set of pics is a tiny deer on July 30th then a normal deer 1st August. Both bucks are similar stature, standing in similar spots, but one is obviously much larger in every way. Proportions are same but scale is different.
This second set of pics is a bachelor group of bucks to show it's not just an oddball tiny deer. They're all like that. And again standing in similar location and similar angle is the normal buck, also roughly same age as small buck with stretched out neck. I don't get a normal size deer very often and almost never get them in a situation like this so it's cool when I can visually compare their pics side by side with the oompa loompas.
And these last few pics are of my first velvet hunt......but don't laugh. I'd had a nice 10pt on cam all summer that had a full pretty rack that was out well past his ears and beams out to tip of nose, symmetrical minus one stumped brow. Keep in mind I'm from Ohio so up to this hunt I was relating a 10pt buck out past his ears with a 200lb+ animal that would easily bust the P&Y threshold. There was a big tall 8pt running with him so my brother came down from Ohio to hunt with me in hopes we'd double up on what would be either of our first velvet bucks. We looked at dozens of trail cam pics of both bucks and agreed they were shooters. Well as luck would have it I got a shot on the 10. As we walked up to see the dead buck my brother burst out into hysterical laughter. He'd never seen such a miniature buck and didn't know something like that even existed. In trail cams it looked like a full grown buck. But in person it was about like a medium dog. He took a picture of me as I was picking its head up and I dwarf that buck. My bow was literally longer than the deer's body. For scale those arrows in the quiver are 29" long.
But at least I know what to expect. It's a mental adjustment to keep the score relative. Killing a 5yr old 118"-120" buck is as much accomplishment as killing a 5yr old 150's on my place in OH.
