Passport to Texas

Trophy buck taken by Tom Roughton with guide Rene Garza, January 17, 2006.

TPW TV: Buck Fever Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

While hiking, you spy a buck in the distance with large, perfectly formed antlers. Your heart races; your breath becomes shallow; your nerves tingle. Hunters call this buck fever. What do perfect antlers look like?

06— Nice smooth lines, tall tines coming off the main beams; very symmetrical one side to the other.

John Stein should know; he’s curator at the Buckhorn Saloon and Museum in San Antonio, where antler and taxidermy covered walls draw visitors by the thousands.

05— Overall, in the collection, there’s over 12-hundred trophies that are on the walls –of all difference species.

Some hunters pay landowners handsomely to bag trophy animals—money that’s funneled into land management and conservation. For 25 years, deer experts at the Kerr WMA have studied the genetic and nutritional aspects of antler growth in bucks, and have shared the data with landowners; biologist, Gene Fuchs.

15— The information that we’ve gained from this study shows that through selection – by never allowing a buck that was a spike to ever breed a doe – we produced no spike antler yearling bucks two years in a row. And, the percentage of good quality antler yearling bucks has steadily increased.

Learn more this week when a segment called Buck Fever airs on the TPW PBS TV Series. Check your local listings.