Monroeville man killed antlered doe near Oak Hill in January 1986

Miller with antlered doe in 1986.

Deer season is in full swing in Wilcox County, and I ran across an old newspaper item the other day that will interest many local outdoor enthusiasts.

I was looking through some old newspapers from January 1986 the other day and saw a picture of a doe with antlers that William A. “Bill” Miller Jr. killed on Jan. 8 of that year. Miller, who lived in Monroeville, at first thought the 157-pound deer was a buck when he shot it with his 30-06 rifle around 4 p.m. near Oak Hill. He said the deer had small antlers – a button on the right side of its head and a spike on the left – and that it “behaved liked a buck.”

However, when Miller got close enough for a real good look at the deer, he was surprised to see that the deer was actually a doe with antlers.

One of the first people to whom Miller showed the unusual doe to was Conservation Officer Randy Acton. Acton said that it was the first antlered doe he had ever seen in person, although he’d heard about them and seen photos of them before. Acton noted that, at the time, it was legal to kill a doe that had antlers visible above the hairline.

While doing research on antlered does, I learned that this is extremely rare. One source said that you may have one or two antlered does in a population of 300,000 deer, and another source said it occurs about once in every 10,000 deer. Sources also noted that a true antlered doe would have ovaries, so their antlers won’t shed the velvet that grows on developing antlers, which would harden later.

Some antlered does can grow large racks. In November 2021, a hunter in Missouri killed an antlered doe with a 16-point rack. The hunter that killed that deer had captured pictures of the deer on his game camera prior to the day that he shot it.

Antlered doe with racks that large are extremely rare. Sources say that most antlered does usually have small antlers that don’t have a chance to develop into large hardened antlers. Miller’s deer falls into the category of these “normal” antlered does.

Reading about Miller’s antlered doe reminded me of the unbelievable 39-point buck killed in Wilcox County in January 1972 by Gene Tuney Mixon of Old Texas. That deer was killed in Wilcox, just west of the Wilcox-Butler County line, and weighed 247 pounds. Mixon killed that monster buck with a Fox double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun not far from the Mt. Moriah Baptist Church.

In the end, I’m sure lots of other hunters in the reading audience have had encounters with other unusual deer and similar oddities from the outdoors world. If so, please let me hear from you, especially if you’ve encountered an antlered doe or a buck larger than Mixon’s. Who knows, maybe you’ve seen something that no one else in the world has ever laid eyes on.