How can you tell a benchleg from a muley or blacktail? I have seen many deer around here and as I move further east up over the cascades, I see mulies, but what are the concrete physical attributes that tell for sure?
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Mule Deer are stocky, and run in a stodding gate. All four legs hitting the ground together and bounching.
they have large ears, about eight to nine inches long vrs the blacktails ears are the same as a whitetails.
Antlers on a muledeer and blacktail can be the same configuration, but the blacktails are usually about the same size as a medium ot small mule deer.
Blacktailed deer are mostly coastal deer too, where the mule deer are a desert to high alpine deer.
I have no clue as to what a Benchleg is. Something someone has cooked up I belive, like going snipe hunting...LOL
between a blacktail and Mule deer.
I would hate to try and figure out the differance there.
To many similarities and it would be impossible to figure them out for sure.
I guess it is not such a Snipe hunt after all.
I would think that the Benchleg would look more mule deer looking. Probably with a longer ear. Never heard of one before, or just didn;t remmeber it
What i have seen in a mule deer is that when the horns are growing, the tallest tine is in the back, sometimes sloping up and forward, above the front tines. Also, they tend to grow outward more instead up upward.
With a blacktail deer, they have antlers that grow symetrical in hieght in front and back, where they branch out. Also, they grow more upward like a tree.
As for colorations between the two, it is very hard to tell. Antlers i can tell with relatively little problem, its the color that is difficult. Some black tails have white faces while most if not all mulies have white faces as well. Ears are the easy part, but there are so many different kinds of color patterns. even blacktails themselves come in dozenz of color patters and shades...