Young Buck

For several months one of my camera traps in the Big Woods has captured photos of a young buck with distinctive antlers. He’s now 18 months old, more or less equivalent to a teenager in human terms. 

Throughout the summer and early fall he’s been hanging around with his mother and sibling. The camera trap has captured many, many photos of him – far too many to keep them all.

I’d never actually seen the young guy until one extremely cloudy morning not long after dawn when I walked along an old woods road. Movement to the side of the road caught my eye, and there he was –

Just as he apparently was never frightened by the flash of the camera trap, he didn’t demonstrate any fear as I stood less than 100 feet away and photographed him.  Unfortunately, the light level was so low that the hand-held photos were taken at 1/25 of a second at an ISO of 6400 and so are of poor quality.

 

Young bucks normally leave their mother’s home range when they disperse to find a territory of their own, so I’ve probably gotten the last photos of him.