Courtesy of  Wichita Eagle

BY MICHAEL PEARCE

The Wichita Eagle

RICE COUNTY – From bitter cold to 85 degrees last week, Matt White walked many miles. He jumped across countless creeks, weaved his way through thick brush and hurried across broad expanses of open fields.

“It’s kind of like exercise for a purpose,” White said as he walked a creek bottom Thursday afternoon.

It’s more like exercise for a passion.

This year, White has found 64 antlers shed by bucks. His brothers, Nick and Scott, have collected about 20 each this year. The men in their mid-20s have collected about 1,000 shed antlers in their lives.

Much of their lives revolve around whitetail deer. Through the summer they use trail cameras and binoculars to check the antler-growing progress of bucks where they hunt.

Last fall, Matt and Nick White bow-killed bucks that could score high in the Pope & Young record book. On Oct. 27, Scott White bow-killed a buck that grossed slightly more than 200 inches of antler.

Their minds turn toward finding shed antlers once the deer seasons end.

“I start in early January glassing wheat fields (with binoculars),” Matt White said. “I know that’s really too early but I can’t help it. By late January, I’ll start walking the edges of fields.”

From then on, they’re ready to walk any particular area if the time seems right.

Much of this winter, one of Matt White’s trail cameras showed a trophy-class 12-pointer coming to a pile of corn.

One day the buck showed up without antlers.

“I found them within about 200 yards of where we got the pictures,” he said. “I figured I’d find them pretty close.”

The Whites also figure they’ll find certain antlers year after year.

Looking for shed deer antlers is one way they keep an inventory on the growth of bucks in their area.

By looking at particular antler’s characteristics — the sweep of a main beam, angle of points or a peculiar oddity — they can identify certain bucks.

Scott White has four consecutive years of sheds from the big buck he shot last year. They’d named the buck with exceptionally tall tines “The Big Nine.”

Thursday, he found a mediocre five-point shed from a buck the brothers had called “Right Side.”

“He never seems to get any bigger, year after year,” Matt White said as he looked at the shed antler. “He was about like this when he was 2 ½. This year he’ll probably be a 4 ½-year-old, but he won’t have the antlers to show it.”

As well as the antler itself, Matt White makes sure he has something to show for all of his finds.

He photographs every antler he finds before he picks it up.

“It’s kind of fun to relive that moment again down the road by looking through the pictures,” he said.

He hasn’t had the opportunity to photograph some antlers he’s collected recently.

He’s trained his 2-year-old Labrador retriever, Tess, to fetch shed antlers.

It began as simple playtime at home and in the yard. He’s working to get her to search for antlers when they’re out together.

“She’s brought a few back to me on her own,” he said. “If I see one I may call her over and work her. Usually when she finds it she’ll bring it to me.”

The Whites search for shed antlers beyond their personal hunting grounds.

Matt White’s best place is a bedding area where the landowner allows no hunting and nobody else to look for sheds.

He once found 15 sheds at the spot in a morning.

All three brothers will travel a few hours to look at other areas in Kansas.

Most summers they take a trip to Colorado to search for shed elk, mule deer and moose antlers as they scout hunting spots for the upcoming archery elk season.

Nick White said he loves the unknown of searching new areas. He said he sank to his knees and just stared when he found the sheds of a buck now named Ji-normous, a 200-inch class deer he never got to see.

“That’s a lot better than knowing some huge buck out there has dropped his horns and all you have to do to find them is keep walking,” Matt White said. “You just can’t stop until you find them. It almost haunts you.”