Two Bucks Found Floating Dead In Minnesota Lake With Locked Antlers

Boy, this is sad to see. Two bucks were found with their antlers locked together, dead, floating in a lake in Minnesota. I traced down who took the photo to get the story of how this happened, and what took place after. Warning, these images could be graphic to some readers.

I talked with Jennifer Marshal about what she found on a morning last week. She said there have been three large bucks in the area coming in and out of her property consistently. At one point she noticed that there was only one buck around, and two of them had been missing.

The next day she walked out in the morning and found her yard all torn up with scrapes and deer tracks, and kicked up deer which suggests two deer were fighting each other. It's rut season for deer, which means males will get aggressive with each other as they spar over dominance in mating season.

That appears to be exactly what happened here in Cross Lake, Minnesota.

It was found in the channel on the Whitefish Chain. They were right outside of Jennifer's Marina off of one of the docks. They could tell where the deer went in while fighting. Jennifer says the water is always very calm and doesn't move in this spot, but the deer had moved all the way down to the end of her docks. That suggests obviously that the struggle continued in the water.

These are really nice bucks, and it's just a shame that it happened. But, it's not the first time deer have been found dead with their antlers locked. The same has happened to other antlered animals.

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So what did they do? Jennifer called the DNR and they came out to investigate. Some neighbors nearby asked if they could salvage the meat and worked with the DNR to get the deer out.

It was a tough struggle as the water is ice cold this time of year. They initially tried to free the antlers in the water so they could pull them out one at a time, but they didn't have any luck. They had to use equipment to hoist them out and then salvage the meat. Knowing that they had been seen recently they figured the meat was still able to be saved. No word on what happened with those racks.