Shed Hunting At Juniper Hill (3 Antlers in 2 weeks!)

 Today, I was walking in the woods at Juniper Hill, when I started finding piles of deer scat. Everywhere. I was in awe at the amount of the tiny, dark beads of fresh shit. I already knew there were deer here, from trail cam footage, tracks, and actually seeing them. I also recently discovered a deer bed on that hillside. I wandered around for about five minutes, following the hoof marks in the ice, and kept finding bigger and bigger clusters of bigger and bigger scat. I even found one made by a coyote. As I worked my way into a huge area dominated by Eastern White Pine new growth, something caught my eye. A tiny antler.

While it clearly belonged to a very young buck (maybe a two year old), and wasn't as impressive in size as my other two antlers, it was in PERFECT condition. I mean this thing had probably been dropped within the week that I found it. It still had a little red stain where it broke off from the skull, and I guess it took a little bit of skin and hair with it:

...This is actually the third sheded antler that I have in my bone collection (not counting my brother's two antlered buck skull). 

I Returned to the site a few days later, I went searching for more. I checked around the place where I had found the one mentioned above. Nothing. I did find a flock of turkeys though... The Juniper Hill Turkey Flock. As I left, a came across a pile of brush and bark-less pine twigs. Boom. Two MASSIVE, symmetrical antlers. I was shocked. They were in almost perfect condition, and were both very heavy...

 I wouldn't call myself a shed hunter, like some youtubers iv'e seen who can recover 30+ antlers in a day, but I do collect them, and I love finding them, since they're so rare in urban areas like Framingham. Each of the three has it's own story.

...Found at my aunt's old house in Maine, when she lived off the grid.

 My uncle Scott was a hunter, and I am starting to suspect now that I didn't really find an untouched antler, and that I had instead found one of my uncle's finds, that he had left in the yard, and my aunt let me think it was my find, and take it home, since I was really young. This antler had unfortunately had it's prongs chewed dull my rodents. Not even deer antlers can escape decomposition.

 ...me and my family found that one last Spring, when we went to Sage's Ravine in Western MA. It was lodged into the root system of a Hemlock growing next to the river. This was AFTER I created my old blog on Google Sites, and here is the link: Sage's Ravine, 2021. It would be the PERFECT antler, but instead of having it's prongs chewed by rodents, the little guys had gone for the main beam, and the photo above doesn't show the best angle, but it had almost been divided in half by the tooth marks.

This is the one I found today. It's perfect condition makes up for it's small size.

After dropping the antlers into my backpack, I continued on my walks. I started following some deer tracks that had been imprinted a while ago in snow, and now that we've had so much warm weather and rain, it's more like tracks imprinted in solid ice. After following them for a couple minutes, I noticed two big white, fluffy tails whip upright, and two antler-less deer hopped and bounded out of sight before i could take any photos. Rather than harassing them, I continued west until I made it to the deer's bed. There were of course no deer hanging out there as I set up my camera on the hemlock that faced it, but there was more than a little evidence that the spot was heavily used (mostly in the form of more droppings)

 

Stay tuned for the results.