The Story
In May the antlers are still wearing skin, a velvety network of tissue and blood vessels. By November the same white-tailed bucks walk the same Maine woods roads with that growth hardened and polished.
That change is the plot here. Trail camera footage from the filmer's own woods roads and game trails keeps returning to one group of bucks across the months, so each rack can be read against its earlier self, the way anyone who pulls a card in July and again in October already does.
The calendar is tight. In Maine, new antlers begin growing in April and are shed between late December and early March, and antlers generally harden by fall. A buck builds the whole structure in a few months and carries it finished for a few more, which gives a polished rack a short shelf life.
Autumn is when the results show. One buck stands in fall-colored forest, side-on, long tines rising off both beams, with the white band behind his nose, the pale ring around his eye and the white patch at his throat all plain in the light.
The filmer calls the finished rack a crown of thorns, advertising and demonstrating dominance, and the rack has work to do. Before and during the breeding season, bucks rub their antlers on trees and paw scrapes under a licking branch, leaving gland secretions to communicate. Rivals clash antlers for access to a doe. They do not guard harems, so each fight is over one doe. Summer company does not last through it: bucks may form groups of two to four in summer, and those groups break up before the mating season. In Maine, breeding activity peaks in mid-November, the month this footage ends.
One buck carries a field mark of his own. His eyes do not match: one shines back at the lens and the other stays dark, and no camera can say why.
