Originally Posted by MontanaMan
John............for big Sonoran bucks, yours &, especially your buddy's are more typically formed than many I've seen. Many are pretty badly crab-clawed.

Many larger heads from there tend to be more like the one in the OP than typical, &I really don't like their looks.

The pic in the OP is BIG, no matter how it was taken, but IMHO, it's not an attractive head compared to most of the larger heads from further North.

Here are what good looking Mule Deer should look like.

All these are from some areas in SE Idaho where we hunted for a long time before things there went to hell.

The 1st pic is the current Idaho all time #2. The bottom pic is me with a thinner, but wide racked deer that made 177. The middle pic is of a couple of really big, heavy deer.

MM

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[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

I don't have any preconceived ideas of what a big mule deer "should look like." Do have a good friend--a little older than I am--who grew up in southeast Idaho, and his first buck made B&C. It didn't look like the bucks you show, but so what? It was tall and relatively narrow--but with very long tines.

They vary from Mexico to Canada, one reason I've hunted them from Mexico to Canada--along with New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Here's my biggest Montana buck, both in body weight and antlers. Didn't get to weigh him, since this was around 20 miles from the nearest trail-head, on a horseback hunt with my late outfitter friend Richard Jackson, who I used to guide for before he was killed in a horse wreck in his 40s:

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“Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.”
John Steinbeck