Trail digital camera footage reveals a buck working a scrape earlier than falling down and having what seems to be a seizure. courtesy of Growing Deer TV
A video that was shared to Instagram earlier this month by Growing Deer TV reveals path digital camera footage of a buck working a scrape at an undisclosed location. While lifting its head to work an overhanging limb, the buck abruptly hits the bottom and has what seems to be a seizure. At least that’s the speculation held by Grant Woods, a well-respected whitetail biologist, habitat supervisor, and the host of Growing Deer TV.
Woods says {that a} viewer named John Gibbs despatched him the path digital camera footage and requested for his opinion. The video doesn’t have a timestamp, and Gibbs selected to not share the situation the place it was recorded.
“I’d never seen anything like it, but after talking back and forth we think this buck had a seizure,” Woods says, including that he can’t consider another cheap rationalization. “I’ve never heard of or seen anything like it, and not a mention from any of my colleagues about a buck acting like that.”
Moving down the listing of doable causes, Woods explains that seizures aren’t a symptom of power losing illness (CWD) or Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease (EHD). He doesn’t suppose the seizure was attributable to one thing the buck ate, both, because it’s doubtless that different deer within the space would have had an identical response and Gibbs hasn’t seen any proof of this.
Gibbs has, nevertheless, recorded extra footage of the buck for the reason that seizure video was shared on Nov. 1. The buck returns to the scrape and acts utterly regular within the later movies. But when he and Woods took a better look, they seen that the deer was lacking an eye fixed. It’s onerous to say for certain if the deer misplaced the attention earlier than the seizure video was recorded, since that video solely reveals the buck’s proper facet. But if this was certainly the case, Woods thinks it’d provide a extra full rationalization for the seizure.
“I assume—and this is a total assumption—that he got in a fight [with another buck] and somehow got his eye knocked out,” Woods says. “And there was probably some neurological damage with that injury. We’re just piecing it together here and I need to make that clear, but I think it’s a pretty logical conclusion.”