The fact that deer shed their antlers each year and then grow a new rack is mind-boggling. Only members of the deer family do this. It’s great to shoot that buck of a lifetime and put his antlers on your wall, but once you do, that’s the end of the line for that deer. However, sheds are the gifts that keep on giving. As long as a buck remains alive, he’ll keep growing and shedding his antlers year after year.

It’s really cool to watch a buck mature and grow into a “shooter.” If you’re really good (or really lucky) you might find multiple sheds off a particular buck. The ultimate, of course, would be to find every shed the buck ever grew and then kill him. The longer the buck lives and the more antlers he sheds, the tougher this proposition becomes.

In many areas, age is a limiting factor. Many bucks simply don’t live very long. This is especially true in areas with high hunting pressure. I’ve been fortunate to find three years’ worth of sheds off a few different bucks, but I don’t have all the matches and I never killed any of them.

However, I’ve heard some pretty amazing stories of long-lived giant whitetails and the diligent shed hunters who sought their antlers. One particular buck was about 10 years old. A pair of friends found 15 sheds off the buck and ultimately found the deer dead with the antlers still on the skull. What’s more, an extra sticker point was the only thing that kept the buck from making Boone & Crockett. The chances of a buck living 10 years is very low in most places. The odds of finding almost every antler the buck ever grew — and of a world class whitetail, no less — must be astronomical.

Another shed hunting friend got to know a buck quite well. This buck also lived to be about 10 years old. It grew a drop tine five years in a row, but broke it off all but one year. This buck also flirted with the B&C mark. It managed to dodge hunters its whole life and the shed hunter found the buck dead after it had shed its antlers. Amazingly, the shed hunter found one of the buck’s sheds nearly a decade after the buck died!

Most of the time if I find an antler, I do a quick little search in the surrounding area for the match and if I don’t find it right away, I move on. If it’s a large antler, I’ll try harder. But those who have history with a buck put in a major effort to find sheds from the deer, sometimes to the point that finding those antlers becomes an obsession.

I met a third shed hunter who collected sheds off a large mule deer. Each year he scoured the hills in search of the buck’s sheds. He found many of them a year or two after they were shed because in time, they bleached in the sun and were much easier to see. He, too, found most of the antlers the buck ever grew, but one haunted him for years. He finally found the shed … 17 years after the buck dropped it! It was tucked tightly into a sage bush and you had to be almost on top of it to see it. In the arid west, where the climate is dry and squirrels are few, sheds can survive for many years.

Finding sheds off a buck you know adds excitement to the hunt and gives you incentive to look harder. Although finding any shed is thrilling, the experience is a little sweeter when you find a shed off a familiar deer.

— Joe Shead is a hard-core outdoorsman and a dedicated shed hunter. Professionally, Joe is an outdoor writer and a former managing editor of Deer & Deer Hunting magazine. His years of shed hunting experience inspired him to write the first full-length book about the topic. “Shed Hunting: A Guide to Finding White-Tailed Deer Antlers” is recognized as the ultimate guide to finding whitetail sheds and can be purchased on his website.