Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Muley/whitetail hybrid

I'll have to take your word about the tarsals, that would be the only way you could convince me that buck was anything but a full blown mule deer. Can't see the tail though either

Some pretty negative people on here, don't want to believe what happened to someone else.
Might as well change your name to Johnny Raincloud.

I've heard that the hybrids do not have good survival rates due to having the "schtumbling" gait Mule Deer mentioned. Mule deer evade predators by stotting and whitetails run to heavy cover. The hybrids do neither, and are thus more susceptible to predation. That's the story I recall. I'm forgetting the source, but it may have come from Valerius Geist.

The hybrid buck I saw was shot by a friend near Wheatland WY in the late '70s. Had a nice rack that looked like a whitetail.

The features were much like the buck Dwayne (BC30cal) described, "it had slightly bigger ears and a big blockier face, but otherwise the coloration was whitetail." Definitely did not look like the deer in Mule Deer's pic, which has more of a MD look to me.

The tail was 50/50 whitetail and muley, the first half being WT, and the end half was mule deer like, complete with the black tip.

Of course we knew nothing about the tarsal gland location.

The small group of us that saw the deer were 100% in agreement that it was a cross, but none had ever heard of one before. Nor have I seen one since then.

As an added note, hybrid fawns have a high mortality rate in captivity and consequently believed to have an even higher mortality rate in the wild. And that is likely the limiting factor of hybrids becoming numerous enough to “swamp” populations of muleys and whitetails.

John,
You are correct in pointing out the difference in sterility rate of bucks vs does, however captive hybrid does have a higher than “normal’ rate of sterility.

The rate of sterility also changes with the ratio of the cross, the less an individual has of DNA of one species the more likely it is fertile. Even with today’s level of DNA analysis, the ratio can only be determined to the second or third generation in wild deer the last I knew.

Based on captive hybrid deer with known ratios, DNA analysis has difficulty identifying say, 7/8 muley and 1/8 whitetail and vica versa.

A friend killed one years ago in western Oklahoma. Mule deer antlers and a short but definitely white tail tail. I also saw a whitetail buck tending a mule deer doe in that same area.

Our wildlife department claims which ever species breeds the the cross doe, the fawn will predominately be the buck's species.There quite a few on a ranch about 6 miles east of me. I shot a buck this pasts season in eastern Colorado that sure looked like a cross

Took this buck, DIY, on The Spanish Gourd, a low fenced ranch about 16 miles north of Brackettville Tx., circa 2002. Don't know if it is a white-tail/muley cross, but it does have the characteristics. I'd been watching a 4pt. and a doe, they kept looking in a specific direction. I waited about an hour when this guy comes in on a dead run heading straight toward the 4pt. Caught him at the point of his withers and he plowed dirt.

On this ranch we could take a doe, a cull and a trophy buck. He was +/- 6 years old, had no brow tines. IMHO he was a cull, but no dice, that was my trophy buck for that year.










ya!


GWB