Since male deer shed their horns,
why do you rarely find them?

I have wondered about that, too. I decided to ask a young friend, Scott Wendlandt, who has spent a lot of time watching and studying deer. Here is what he told me:

First, you must consider that deer range over rather wide areas, maybe twenty acres or more. Just to find a set of antlers within twenty acres, even when the antlers are first shed, would take careful searching and some luck. A second reason is that rodents such as squirrels and rats like to chew on antlers, perhaps because of the calcium or phosphate that they contain.

Scott says that he has found only about twenty cast-off antlers, even after years of looking for them. And most of those were partly chewed up. It’s interesting to realize that even deer horns are recycled in nature.