Dressed to impress
Houdini having a drink at the fish pond.
He's muddy, but cleaner than he was.
During the rut all the does, fawns, yearlings, and spike bucks look really good.... keeping themselves neat and clean, just like they do for the rest of the year. But... at this time of year the mature bucks are a filthy mess, covered with mud and oily secretions from their various scent glands. A typical buck rubs his face on a gland to pick up this stuff, then rubs it all over his body. Then dust sticks to it and gets rubbed into the hair. The end result is a buck that looks pretty grungy to us, but must look pretty good to the does. Houdini is one of the grubbier bucks. This pic is a little misleading. Here he's been caught before he's plastered his face with a thick mud-pack. Bucks with a normal color pattern look pretty bad during the rut, but a white one really looks awful when he's finished "dressing for a date". Houdini has a habit of touching you with his nose. If it's muddy you can end up with smudgy nose prints on your shirt and pants, usually where you can't see them but other folks can. Checking my jeans before bed one night I found a big brown nose print on my back pocket, not just color, but with small crusty chunks, looking like I had sat in something really unpleasant. I knew it must have been seen by a ton of people when we were shopping earlier in the day.