The late afternoon sun was sinking when the deer stepped out in front of Maxine Byrd.
It had a nice set of antlers. Byrd raised her rifle, aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. The deer, 60 yards away, fell dead.
Her son, Terry Byrd, was nearby. They tagged the deer and moved it to a shed for field dressing. In a few minutes, a surprised Terry said, "Wait a minute. This deer doesn't have the right parts."
The nice racked, 9-point deer was a doe.
Sonny Thompson, a biologist with the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, came to the Byrd home, carefully looked over the deer and confirmed that it was a female with a set of antlers. In spite of the scrambled genders, the deer was large and appeared healthy.
Unusual? Certainly, but not unheard of, said Cory Gray, Game & Fish deer program coordinator.
"This is a female deer with an unusually high level of testosterone," he said. "I have seen maybe three of this type of deer. Usually, the antlers are gnarly or in velvet and not fully developed like this one."
Wildlife biologists said these doe rarely give birth to fawns, and Thompson said the doe taken by Byrd was not lactating.
Byrd is 72 years old and was hunting on her 75-acre place near Ida in Cleburne County, north of Greers Ferry Lake. She is an experienced hunter of many years. This season she has already taken an 8-point buck with her muzzle-loader.
"I really enjoy hunting when the grandkids are out there with me," she said. "It was special when one of them got a deer and told me, 'Grandma, I killed a deer with my own compound bow.'"
Byrd and her family work their land to encourage deer and other wildlife. "We put in food plots and we use deer feeders. We feed both corn and rice bran," she said.
Game & Fish officials instructed Byrd to count the deer as a buck since she had tagged it that way. With her earlier 8-point, she has reached the season limit with bucks. "But I can still try for a doe," she said.
Outdoors on 12/04/2014