Shed Hunting

By Trenton Holden on April 1, 2021

Shed hunting is actually the complete opposite of hunting. It is more like mushroom hunting: you have to know what you are looking for and be really focused on the one thing. For those who don’t know, a “shed” is when a buck drops or sheds its antlers in the early spring. The best place to go is to follow deer trails through the woods.
When you are shed hunting, you will never know what you will walk up on or find in the trees. You could walk up on an animal of some sort or old abandoned things or even a lake. The sight of the lake through the trees was a beautiful one, and not only that, lakes are good to look around because the deer go to get drinks from them.
When following a deer trail, you should know what you are looking for, and it can be difficult most of the time. You want to find a trail with a very definitive buck trail. The one major way to tell if it's a buck trail or not is to look at the track, and if it has two little dots behind the front hooves it's typically a buck. The only reason this means it's a buck is because deer have dew claws like dogs do, but deer’s are lower on the leg. The reason this signifies a buck is because they are heavier than does, so they plant their dew claws.
As an example, here is a picture of a doe track to compare it to. Notice that this track is much smaller and doesn’t have the dew claw. Now granted the tracks are through sand, so it could be a really big doe, but that would have to be massive. This picture is a doe track, and it is significantly smaller and has no dew claw as stated before.
Shed hunting can be quite difficult and very time consuming because there are many different factors. One of these factors is a major one: dead elm trees. Dead elm trees typically shed their bark, revealing a white trunk and white branches, and when these branches fall, they can look like antlers. Now if you get lucky, you can find an antler or two of many sizes as well. This one was found two years ago by luck, and it is a very nice-sized shed and could have had a symmetrical antler, which would have been an amazing sight.