The bone white color attracted my attention almost immediately as I stepped out of the truck. There, lying in the leave were two antlers, one large, the other small.

Shed antlers. Fallen from the deer in the middle of the winter and probably covered with snow until the recent melt.

Its shed season, time to go deer hunting. It should be a good year for it too. With the deep snow, and the deer bunched up in restricted areas, the antlers should be easier to find than normal this spring. That is if you know where some deer were holed up this winter.

Shed hunting can tell you if that big buck you saw last fall escaped the other hunters and just might be around again this year.

It can give you something much more tangible than that game camera picture that made you sit out in the woods all those days.

Shed antlers don’t last forever though, squirrels and mice will chew them up pretty fast if given the chance.

I found a whole skull with antlers once one spring and busy at the time, set it aside where I would be sure to locate it again a few days later when I would be back in that part of the woods. When I returned, it was about half gone. What was interesting to me was that the gnawing animals had chewed on the antlers, but not at all on the skull.

If it somewhat rare to find both sides of a bucks rack close together, but several years ago, one of the guys was driving a tractor though the food plot before planting and a strange movement caught his eye, it was an antler stuck into the sidewall of the tractor tire. The white flash catching his eye as it moved. He immediately stopped, looked back, and there was the other antler sitting on the ground where it had just missed getting run over.

More than once, the country trucks have found antlers the hard way by picking them up with a tire.

There are whole web sites dedicated to shed antlers. Shed antlers, if they are not large enough to warrant display all by themselves are excellent sources of craft material and you won’t be cutting up some trophy that you shot during the normal season.

People have even trained dogs to detect and search for shed antlers in their annual spring antler hunts.

My find of the other day was really neat as it came unexpectedly. The large antler had a couple unusual points. The small antler too had its interesting features. The main beam of the larger antler was kind of flattened and resembled a couple other deer racks that had been taken in the area in recent times. Possibly the distinct features indicating a family connection.

So, soon before it starts to green up, plan a walk in the woods, scout around for some turkey sign and you might just come up with a little trophy too.