A female deer with antlers? Yes, a teen hunter just bagged one, Missouri officials say

A teenage hunter in Missouri just killed a deer with antlers.

That isn’t all too unusual except this wasn’t a buck — it was a doe, conservation officials say.

Oak Grove, Missouri resident Brenden Marsh, 18, bagged the 19-point female deer while hunting in Lafayette County just east of Kansas City, according to a news release. The one-in-a-lifetime experience was the largest deer Marsh has taken and his first with a rifle, he said.

“When I saw it, it was walking with four does, and a buck trailed 20 yards behind them,” Marsh said.

It wasn’t until he began field dressing the deer that he realized it didn’t have male genitalia. Marsh’s family arrived and confirmed the deer had no male glands.

Rather, it had a female udder and its antlers were still in velvet. The antlers of male deer will harden as they grow up and use them for fighting during mating season, officials said.

Female deer with high levels of testosterone can sprout antlers, officials said. In same cases, the deer is a hermaphrodite or a male without external genitalia, officials said.

Up to one in every 65 or as few as one in 4,437 female white-tailed deer may grow antlers, depending on the region within North America, according to a 2011 news release from the Missouri Department of Conservation.

“There are not good percentages available for how common or uncommon does with antlers occur,” said Kevyn Wiskirchen, the Missouri Department of Conservation’s private lands deer biologist, according to the November 2019 news release.

However, he did say that it’s “very rare.”

This story was originally published November 27, 2019 at 1:06 PM with the headline "A female deer with antlers? Yes, a teen hunter just bagged one, Missouri officials say."