If you’re an active user of HuntLog, you probably know by now that HuntLog allows you to log your harvest data, including the age of your bucks. This helps you identify trends in your deer herd, such as your buck age structure, average weight by age class, etc. Immediately after the harvest (after all of the high fives), most hunters will enter their harvest data with weight and antler measurements and give their best estimate on the age of the buck.
What you may not know is that you can edit your harvest data (specifically the age of your buck) after you are able to accurately determine the buck’s age by analyzing the jawbone.
Some hunters/managers are experienced enough to analyze tooth wear patterns and accurately estimate a buck’s age, and other hunters typically send jawbones off to a lab or to the state to have them analyzed. Sometimes it can take a few weeks or months to get these jawbone reports back. If you’ve already entered a buck’s age and then you determine later that your initial estimate was incorrect, you can easily edit your harvest data by going to the Harvests tab, clicking on the harvest screen for the buck you’d like to edit, changing the age and clicking Save Harvest.
If you’re not currently pulling jawbones to get the best age data from your bucks (and does), I’d encourage you to start so that you can unlock this extra part of the story that your harvested deer can reveal, improving your ability to successfully manage your deer herd for your hunting objectives.
Take a look at this video from QDMA and get started with learning the most you can from your harvested bucks!
How to Extract a Deer's Jawbone
Making future herd management decisions is a lot easier when you know estimated ages of all the deer you harvested. Kip Adams shows you how to easily collect a jawbone so you can grab valuable age data this season.
Posted by The Quality Deer Management Association on Wednesday, October 18, 2017
