Lancaster – For 17-year-old Georgia Vesperman of Lancaster, this year’s nine-day gun deer hunt will be one she won’t soon forget, and will have an extremely rare trophy on her wall to always remind her.
At first glance, Vesperman’s trophy looks no different than your typical 10-point buck. With an 18-inch spread and three-inch brow tines it’s a nice rack, but nothing crazy.
The crazy part is that she didn’t harvest a buck. The deer Vesperman shot had all the reproductive organs of a doe, but the rack of a buck.
Yep, it’s a 10-point doe. Biologists estimate that one in every 10,000 does can develop antlers. Even then, antlered does typically have small racks similar to your spike for forked bucks.
Without getting into an in depth biology lesson here, all female deer apparently produce a small amount of testosterone, but when the hormone quantities get out of balance and a doe produces an unusual amount of testosterone, they can display male characteristics such as antlers.
If does produce more testosterone than the average doe, they can grow small or large antlers that may stay in velvet year round. If they produce normal buck levels of testosterone, they can produce regular hardened antlers every year.
The doe Georgia shot on Jeff and Lori Vesperman’s land near Stitzer on Sunday, Nov. 26, obviously produced more testosterone you’re your normal doe, but not as much as your normal buck.
When dragging the deer out of the woods, one of the antlers pulled off from its base, and appeared hollow inside and much lighter than a bucks antler.
“The antler was actually like hollow inside,” said Georgia’s father Jerry Vesperman. “When we were moving it around to get pictures, I heard a tearing sound and by then it ended up coming off at the base, and it actually still had a piece of velvet hanging from it.”
For Jerry, the 10-point doe didn’t come as a huge surprise, as he knew for a couple of years this deer was different.
“We’ve seen this buck before and had it on camera for a couple of years now,” explained Jerry. “We notice that the rack wasn’t getting any bigger with age.”
On his nephew’s trail camera, a photo of the deer was captured as it was walking straight away from the camera. It was then that they noticed it didn’t have the male anatomy of a typical buck. They also noticed the rack on the deer was also still in velvet into the beginning of November.
Georgia, who has been deer hunting since she was 10 years old, made a 260-yard shot on the deer with her trusty 243 from her tower stand at 4 p.m. that eventful evening.
“At first she just thought it was a decent buck and didn’t get real excited, but once we drug it out and saw that it was a doe, I told her this is like shooting a 200-inch buck, it’s very, very rare,” Jerry said.
“If I had to guess I would say it’s probably four and a half or five and a half years old, because this is it’s third or fourth set of horns,” he explained.
The deer was registered as a buck because it is an antlered deer, and it has since been sent to the taxidermist to be shoulder mounted.
Georgia will forever be explaining to those who see her trophy on the wall, that it is not your typical 10-point buck, but rather something much more special.
