Bucks Not Does

When I went outside this morning, bright and early to fill the bird feeders, there were 5 white-tailed bucks just outside my door.  I froze, and they calmly continued munching for 10 minutes or so before they calmly meandered off into my side woods.

Observing does or does with fawns is commonplace, but sighting the bucks brings another level to it all.  They are so majestic - and somewhat elusive.  Three were two-point and two of them were spikes.

Ah, perhaps some clarification is in order.  Out here we use the "Western count", by only counting the number of points on one side of the rack.  (So in this morning's case, two-point means two points on each side of the rack.)  Growing up here, I had never realized that other places counted them differently, as in counting all the points, until I was traveling for basket teaching and the topic came up.  At first I thought they just had much older deer with huge racks, until I sorted out that an 8-point, in their terminology, was really just a 4-point in ours.

Evidently there is also a third way to count them: " to state the number of points on each side, and state them as X by Y, such as 4 by 4 for an eight pointer".  https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060920194138AAI0HDl

Who knew?  All I know is that I had a very, very special treat this morning.  And even after I came back into the house, I apparently had not startled them because they hung around right at the edge of the woods (20 feet from the house) for quite some time more.