At first I thought he was just an exceptional buck. Old and mature enough to have lots of extra tines at the upper tips of his antlers. Even from over a quarter-mile away I could tell he had extra mass up high.

My plans of sneaking up on foot for a better look (and photographs) were soon thwarted, with the wind being straight from my back towards the herd of 15 deer. So I loaded back into the rig, and simply drove up the draw the deer had trotted into.

And after a few counts, I had the classification I sought. Six does, four fawns, and five bucks. Took several counts through the herd to come up with the same numbers, and after the third or fourth try, I figured out why.

A half-antlered deer.

A buck in the crowd with only one antler, a tall unforked spike on the right side. Too early in the winter for an antler to have been shed yet. Almost certainly an oddity, although I admit the possibility of the left antler being either broken or shot off at the base.

The deer were across the canyon, weaving in and out of the mountainmahogany and red rock. And I tested the new camera to its limits, trying to get a decent shot of the larger buck.

Wasn't until I got the images blown up on the computer that I realized he wasn't really that large.

Leastways, not on the left side.

But his right antler... well, that was another oddity. A single main beam that went almost straight up, like the other odd buck's, but then threw off tines to all sides, like the naked branches of a Christmas tree in March.

Two similar deformities in the same herd, in a desert area that has few deer to speak of. You'd be tempted to assume we've got some sort of genetic anomaly going on here. But the other three bucks in the herd, and a fourth that came running over to join them, were all perfectly normal.

So, I don't know. Guess we'll wait and see what this area produces next year (if the coalbed methane doesn't drive all the deer out).

Besides trying to find deer to classify, we were also checking to see if any elk had moved down to winter in this desert habitat unit again this year. Found one cow peacefully stuffing herself down in the willows, and then tracks of over 30 elk crossing onto the red rim from the south, sometime in the past day or two.

Finally, on the way back out, after finding our passage over the rim blocked by drifts, I spotted a small herd of elk resting on top of a sage ridge. Not the ones that made the tracks, but just the same, I have documented that some of the elk are back. Which is a good thing, because it means they're not wintering up on someone's private ground.

And to top it all off, the heelers got out to run!

More than once.

Always a good thing.