Ryan B asked this question in a thread that was a couple of years old. I started a new thread to answer his question as the thread where he posted "Sheding must be complete by now" is rather confusing due to its age. Then to make matters even more confusing, I didn't see his second thread before posting this one.RyanB wrote:Hey guys. I remember reading back a while ago about some guys building feeders that because of there design would cause an buck ready to drop his antlers to loosen them off dropping them close to feeder.
I am just in the works of making a new feeder at my property and have numerous deer coming in daily so I figured while I was making a new one anyway I would try to build something into it.
Ryan
Sooooooo, without further confusion, here are some thoughts.
As you might imagine, sheds are very important to us at our farm. It is one of the ways we determine if we are actually accomplishing anything with our programs. We use lots of deer cams (cuddies) and monitor the growth of racks on individual bucks. We have six and seven year histories on some bucks. Sheds are just another tool and they serve somewhat of a "report card" if you will. Some of you might recall that we even hired a kid with a trained Labrador retriever last year to run our property and find sheds.
We have looked at all kinds of ways to gather the antlers of bucks including traps. We found almost all to be a waste of time. And in some cases, the antler traps appear to be very unsafe and may actually harm the bucks.
Here is one way that is safe and probably the best if you want to try your hand at trapping a shed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K6JS8VdpvQ
This manner is safe and no harm will come to the buck.
Below are a series of pictures of various antler traps that we looked at and determined that every one was just too unsafe to risk any of our bucks.
Hope this helps out.