Nathan Kiele had never seen anything like it. <\/p>\n
He was elk hunting in Idaho\u2019s Unit 12 north of the Lochsa River when he encountered the bull on an old logging road.<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw that weird formation he had going on. My first thought was \u2018that\u2019s weird\u2019 and then I was (like) \u2018I guess an elk is an elk,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not a trophy hunter. I just hunt for the meat.\u201d <\/p>\n
With that, Kiele took a knee, aimed, squeezed the trigger and dropped the bull that had soft, other worldly formations on its rack. <\/p>\n
\u201cAll the material around his antlers was just like velvet. It felt like velvet and it looked like velvet,\u201d he said. \u201cUnderneath it was antler but it was kind of like barnacles on a ship. Feeling it, it was all soft just like any other velvet elk would be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kiele, of Kamiah, packed it out about 2 miles and took it to a local cooler. The odd antlers soon became the talk of the town. His mother, Tonya Kiele, posted a picture on Facebook where the strange bull again attracted notice. The image was shared and reposted. Comments poured in. Soon there was an Outdoor Life article crafted largely from the Facebook post and associated comments. <\/p>\n
A different kind of bull <\/p>\n
Deer and elk antlers are encased with a soft, skin-like material that is commonly referred to as velvet that is present from the time they start growing in the spring. But members of the cervidae family typically scrape off that soft tissue layer about August or so to expose hardened antlers.<\/p>\n
To encounter an animal in the middle of October with antlers still in velvet is unusual but not unheard of. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never seen an elk like that, only deer,\u201d said Levi Beeler, owner of Clark\u2019s Taxidermy, who is preparing a European mount of Kiele\u2019s bull. \u201cHere lately, we\u2019ve got a fair amount of velvet deer \u2014 stag bucks that don\u2019t shed their velvet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Antlers are one of the wonders of nature. They are bone in structure but grow incredibly fast \u2014 as much as an inch per day, said Marcie Logsdon, a veterinarian who works with wildlife at Washington State University. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe way they are able to grow and shed antlers every single year is really astounding and pretty unique to the animal world,\u201d she said of deer, elk and other cervids.<\/p>\n
The process is dependent on a mix of hormones that respond to the annual cycle of available daylight. Logsdon said in the spring, as days begin to lengthen, hormones signal the body to begin growing antlers. While growing, antlers are living tissue with blood flow.<\/p>\n
As the fall breeding period known as the rut approaches and days grow shorter, male elk, deer and moose begin producing more testosterone. That causes the living tissue to die off and solidify, eventually forming hard antlers used in fights for dominance. As testosterone levels continue to dwindle into late fall and winter, the antlers eventually drop off.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe hardening of antlers is really dependent on testosterone. If a buck or bull for some reason can\u2019t produce enough testosterone, the body never gets the cue for the antlers to harden up,\u201d said Logsdon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nathan Kiele had never seen anything like it. He was elk hunting in Idaho\u2019s Unit 12 north of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282280,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":{"0":"post-282279","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}