Hunter shoots 9-point doe

Kevin Ross calls his unique deer a duck.

While bowhunting in St. Clair County recently, Ross shot what he thought was a 9-point buck. But closer inspection showed the deer was actually a doe, complete with female genitalia.

“We’re calling it ‘Duck,’” Ross told Rod Kloeckner of the Belleville News-Democrat. “You know, a cross between a doe and a buck—a duck.”

“This is a very big oddity, a huge oddity,” Ross said. “It’s so rare that when I checked it into Town Hall Archery (in Belleville), and they’ve been in business forever, they said they’ve never seen this before.

“They were pretty amazed at it. People were coming out with their cell phones, calling people and taking pictures. They made a big deal like it was some monster buck. This is just an anomaly.”

Writes Kloeckner:

How rare is an antlered doe? According to a report published in 2004 by Christopher DePerno of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and Jonathan Jenks, of South Dakota State University, researchers estimate one in every 1,000 to 6,000 whitetailed females produces antlers. In the same article, Pennsylvania researches reported one antlered doe per 3,500 antlered deer.

Tom Micetich, deer project manager for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, said he is aware of a couple of oddities where whitetails had sex organs of both male and female. One occurred during the first shotgun season last month, and one from a few years back.

Usually, Micetich said, antlers on females remain in velvet, which supplies nutrients and oxygen to the growing bone.

“Antlered females are rare,” Micetich wrote in an e-mail. “Polished antlers on a female would be quite rare.”

Click here to read the rest of Kloeckner’s story.

Ross also has what he said is video of the doe. Click here to see that video and video of a pair of bucks he found with locked antlers.