Growth

I'm back to posting on this blog! I had a few pictures left over from my stay in Cuenca so I've still been posting on the Ecuador blog but I'm done with those and ready to pay proper attention to my beloved lake and my fellow dwellers.

There's an absence of fawns around the lake this year. Normally, there would be a few babies around at this point but I haven't seen any yet. Very curious. However, I have seen a couple of young ones. Here's a young buck, you can see the antlers just beginning to grow from the two nubs on the deer's head known as pedicules. They protrude out of the skull in the first year of life and support the antlers, which don't begin growing until the buck is in his second year.

That first year most deer species grow short spike-like antlers. It isn't until the third year that a deer will begin to have antlers that branch out, with each year adding more branches. Antlers are actually living bone that male deer are able to regenerate annually. The antlers are shed in January or February after the mating season and then begin to grow again in the spring, sometimes at the rate of almost two inches a day. Only members of the deer family grow antlers, which vary in size from species to species and are the fastest growing type of tissue in the entire world of animals.

Growing antlers are covered with a substance called velvet, a brownish hued fur that encases a network of blood vessels and endings of nerves. The velvet provides the nutrients for the antlers as they develop. During this time antlers are easily damaged so a deer will be very careful not to do anything that might hurt them. Once they have achieved maximum growth the deer will rub the velvet off its antlers, which harden in the late summer.

I'll show the antlers' progress throughout the next few weeks and I very much hope to see some fawns soon. I'm a little concerned by their absence.