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Bucks drown after locking antlers
Published 12:00 p.m., November 18, 2008
Photo by Photo Provided
The hunting party.
Jim Keller thought his deer season was over as he headed toward his farmhouse northeast of Henning Sunday morning.
Keller was wrong.
As he walked a road he’d traveled thousands of times, the Champlin man saw a first: Two bucks motionless under about three inches of ice, their antlers entwined.
“I happened to look over in the ditch and see the antlers sticking out,” Keller said Monday. “It was awesome. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Wary of removing the animals, Keller and his brother-in-law, Dave Coughlin, enlisted the help of Tricia Plautz, a Henning-based conservation officer with the Department of Natural Resources.
“In the fall of the year, when the bucks start to rut, they get very territorial,” she said, and it’s not uncommon for two animals of the same size to lock antlers in a deadly battle.
“If they can’t get them apart, one of the bucks will get beaten to death by the other,” she said
In Sunday’s find, Plautz surmises both bucks drowned during their fight or once they’d reached the point of exhaustion. The drowning must have occurred this fall, she said, thought it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when.
Keller used a fence-post to break the ice, and with the help of family and friends in his hunting party, dragged the animals out of the ditch with a rope and loaded them on to a vehicle.
“It took six guys to pick them up and put them in the truck,” Keller said.
Photo by Photo Provided
From left, Dave Coughlin, Jim Keller and DNR Conservation Officer Tricia Plautz remove the buck heads after dragging the animals from an icy ditch.
One of the animals was an eight-point buck with an estimated green score of 146, he said. The other was a 21-pointer, with an estimated score of 189.
Keller, who splits his time between the Twin Cities and the Henning property he’s owned for 10 years, says the heads have gone to an area taxidermist. When all is said and done, they will end up on his wall, tangled antlers and all.
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