Field Aging a White-tailed Deer
Learn how to accurately determine a buck’s age using a teeth aging reference tool.
How do you determine a white-tailed deer’s age? It’s a question you hear a lot from beginning and life-long hunters alike. Depending on who you ask, you’ll get a wide-range of answers, many of which are as smoky as a deer camp campfire.
It’s a common misconception among hunters that a white-tailed deer’s antler size will tell you all you need to know about his age. However, that’s simply not true. Rack size is more about food and nutrition, genes, and overall health than anything else. A 2.5 year old buck could indeed have wider and/or taller antlers than a buck twice his age if all of the aforementioned factors play a big enough part. The same goes for a deer’s body size/weight, hoof size, gray on the face, or any other misconstrued theory you’ll often hear from even the most seasoned hunters. These factors simply shouldn’t be used to indicate relative age.
In reality, the most accurate method of aging is via tooth analysis. Over time, deer will lose certain “baby” teeth, and they’ll put a lot of wear and tear on their remaining pearly whites. By examining and studying this wear and decay, hunters have a fairly precise method to all this aging madness. But don’t think you have to be a wildlife biologist or even an experienced hunter to age your buck; there’s a very handy tool available to make things much easier.
It’s called a Deer Aging Reference Tool, and it offers authentic tooth molds of white-tailed deer in eight separate age classes, ranging from 1.5 to 8.5 years of age.
To age your buck, all you have to do is match the tooth wear pattern to the corresponding pattern on the tool.
No more wondering or guessing or depending on those hand-me-down family wives’ tales to accurately determine the age of your trophy. The Deer Aging Reference Tool has you covered.
You can find it here:
http://deeragingtool.com/shopdat/shopexd.asp?id=30
