Craziest Whitetail Deer Photos

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Editor’s Note: Whitetails are among the most elegant and graceful animals on earth. But if you spend enough time in the woods, you’ll see deer do some strange, funny and awkward things. We put together the 25 craziest deer photos from our users and friends on Facebook and brought in Big Buck Zone Blogger Craig Dougherty to write about deer personalities. His captions don’t explain each photo (some things just can’t be explained), but they do give you some insight on how all deer are different and why some deer behave the way they do.

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Spend any time around whitetails and you will quickly learn that deer are individuals. They have unique likes and dislikes. The have personalities.

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Take bucks for instance. You have your social isolates who spend all of their time alone and want nothing to do with other deer. Then you have your fraternity brothers who can’t seem to function without three or four of their buddies. They hang together and only split up during the breeding season. Some bucks even breed with their buddies hanging around taking it all in, and in some cases they even take turns doing the breeding.

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Some bucks are travelers covering miles each day. They don’t live long in our neck of the woods as a buck on his feet during hunting season is not long for this world. Other bucks are home bodies. They find a piece of real estate and stick to it. The biggest buck ever taken on our 500-acre hunting property seldom left a 30-acre sanctuary the last 2 years of his 5.5-year life. We caught him in the late muzzleloader eating clover in the middle of a late afternoon snowstorm.

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Some bucks are fighters. They don’t live all that long either. You see them on cameras with broken antlers, deformed ears and bristled up back hair. Their ears are always pinned back and the other bucks generally give them a wide birth. They respond to antler rattling, grunt calls, breaking brush and anything that sounds like trouble. That’s how they wind up getting shot. We had one of these guys on our property a couple years back until the neighbor camp shot him while he was working over a 3-D target in their backyard.

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Some bucks are quite passive and seem to avoid confrontation at all cost. They aren’t out marching around all day and if they breed they don’t make a big deal of it. They eat, sleep, grow big antlers and live a long happy life of 5 or 6 years. We see them on camera, quietly minding their own business and only moving at night. They are generally loners and very hard to take.

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Does can be equally interesting. Who hasn’t had an encounter with that old nanny whose sole mission in life is to look for danger? They come to the edge of food plots and spend the whole time blowing, stomping and spooking all the deer in the area. We hunted one of these old nasties for 3 years before finally killing her 20 yards off the food plot. We even put a bounty on her.

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Contrast that with the sweet momma who brings her fawns to the back yard for a few apples and a drink out of the bird bath. Friends of ours have been watching the same doe in their back yard for the last 12 years. They bring her straw to bed in and apples all winter and she finds her way under the tractor shelter. Somehow she keeps making it through.

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Some does are darn right nasty. They rear up and crash down with flailing hooves on the back and head of any deer (including their fawns) that come near them. Others are “supermoms” letting their fawns nurse well into the fall and groom them with obvious tenderness. I never seem to get around to pulling the trigger on these sweet mamas.

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Both bucks and does have individual likes and dislikes in foods. A friend who keeps deer in a 50-acre high fence area feeds them natural vegetation each day. One doe simply loves beech cuttings. The other deer won’t even look at them but that is her first choice each and every night. I’ve seen deer who won’t touch a Ladino clover while other’s can’t get enough of it. One doe I knew simply loved popular leaves.

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We’ve all seen deer chase turkeys but ever see one chase a coyote or bear? How about a deer who would rather hang with the horses than be with the bucks. How about that 6 pointer who beds under the front porch of a hunting cabin all season long or the buck who’d rather eat ice cream than corn on the cob. Not to get gross but my cousin once watched a doe eat from a fresh gut pile. No lie. Fresh fish anyone?

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Watch whitetails enough and you can see almost anything. Pay close attention and you will see definite personality traits. Understanding deer personalities can help you bag a buck or be just plain entertaining. However you look at it is by far the best show in town and best of all it is free for the viewing.