There’s no telling how this fine buck’s head and antlers ended up this way, so we can only surmise and guess what happened.
Could the deer have died next to a small tree, which grew over time around the antlers and skull?
Maybe a hunter placed the skull against the tree. Why anyone wouldn’t take this home with them, we don’t know. Poacher? Someone who didn’t care about antlers, since you can’t make soup out of them?
Perhaps a dog or animal dragged off the skull from a deer camp or found a dead deer in the woods, and then dragged it away.
Nature isn’t always pretty and sometimes it’s perplexing. This photo definitely shows us that in the grand scheme of things, we don’t always have an answer for what happened.
Wow! How many times has this deer escaped the hunter only to have wandered into this mess. How things can change so drastically and we can’t do anything about it except wonder. Nature has it’s ups and downs. PJ
Well, unless the tree was growing horizontally, like a log laying on the ground, none of the above reasons fit the skull in the photo at all. If the skull was laid against the base of a normal vertically growing tree, it would either be pushed away by the growth of the tree, carried off by animals, or at best, grow into the base of the tree. Trees do not grow up from the bottom. If they did, old fences nailed to trees would be 15 feet in the air by now. Trees grow out of their tops, so the skull had to have been wedged in a nook, hole, etc. in that tree at the same height that it was ultimately discovered at. So at least a little of the mystery is solvable!