An Expansible Collar for Male White-Tailed Deer

Abstract

During a study of movements of transplanted white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), the writer devised an expansible collar for marking bucks. This collar will expand in circumference from 18 to 30 inches. The leather collar developed by Progulske (1957. J. Wildl. Mgmt., 21:251252) worked very well for marking female deer, but the swelling of the neck of adult bucks during the rut presented a special problem. If the buckle type collar was made large enough to accomodate neck swelling, it was likely to be lost when the neck returned to its normal size. A working drawing of the expansible collar is shown in Figure 1. The collar was made of any stiff leather such as saddle or luggage leather. The thickness varied