This spike buck, likely a second-summer male, will need good nutrition along with maturity to develop a full rack of antlers. (Betsy Bloom/Daily News photo)

‘Tis the season to consider the marvel of deer antlers.

Our end of Six Mile Lake each year usually has multiple white-tailed does and fawns in the yard. But bucks, even adolescents, tend to be uncommon. They’re often second-summer spikes or a tall fork. One “devil horn” buck last winter left a gift in the backyard when the snows faded, a roughly 3-inch shed shaped like an oversized viper fang. It now sits on our bookshelves.

Very rarely do our resident bucks reach six points, and then it’s an undersized crown that only hints at a potential monarch to come if it can make it through the hunting season when legal to take. We’ve yet to see, on trail cameras or otherwise, a mature male wander through that any hunter would consider a prize.

That’s not surprising. Most of the yard deer are does and fawns of the year. Maturing young bucks are forced to disperse to new territories; they can’t stay in the same area as their mother or sisters, for obvious reasons.

And when I got here in December 2015, the region was coming out of a series of severe winters that took its toll both on adult deer and especially fawns. Lots of baby bucks during that time never got a chance to see those buttons grow.

So, understandably, larger bucks were scarce in the mid- to late part of the last decade. It’s taken years to recover from such losses.

Yet this year I saw several bucks that had sizeable racks while driving along M-95 and M-69 in Dickinson County. It would appear the local deer herd has rebounded.

And I find the ability of these bucks to grow such a crown in a matter of months impressive. Bill Scullon, acting Upper Peninsula regional supervisor for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, agreed.

While people might refer to a deer’s “horns,” deer are significantly different than others that have such headgear. Cattle and their relatives — such as goats and sheep, antelope and rhinos — have horns made of keratin, similar to our hair and fingernails, that grow as they age and are permanent.

Deer actually are related to cattle and share traits — they have chambered stomachs and are ruminants, chewing “cud” like cows.

But deer are unique in having antlers, bone growths on the brow that branch out, nurtured by “velvet” that cycles in blood and other nutrients.

Trophy bucks basically produce a pair of branched dense bones, like growing a ribcage, in a matter of weeks. Most bucks will begin sprouting a rack in April or May and be done by the end of July, Scullon said, making antlers among the fastest-growing bones in animals. Some bucks in the right conditions may add a couple inches in a day, he said.

In comparison, consider how long humans — even quick-healing children — need to fully knit a broken bone.

Usually, smaller antlers signal younger buck, but that’s not always the case, Scullon said. It takes a lot of good nutrition along with good genes to grow that boney headgear, so a prolonged winter with poor forage may mean even older bucks that year will have stunted racks. Conversely, in areas with less winter stress and good food sources, like acorn mast, a second-summer buck may have as many as 10 points, Scullon said.

The forests of the Upper Peninsula usually aren’t ideal, forage-wise, for fostering monster bucks, he said.

Hunting pressure plays into antler development as well. Some areas in Wisconsin known for big bucks have lower hunter densities and lots of private land where deer can reach maturity. Michigan, however, annually sees 500,000 to 700,000 hunt deer, Scullon said. Consequently, most deer he sees taken haven’t reached their third year, and a buck that survives to full maturity at age 5 or 6 is “fairly rare,” he said.

The act of growing those antlers takes a toll as well, he said, sapping resources in summer that might otherwise be channeled into getting the body ready for the coming winter. But for a buck, “the end game is passing on genetic material; it’s not survival.”

So a buck sporting a tall, broad set of antlers advertises many things to the does in the fall: health, proper nutrition, vitality, likely a savvy individual that learned how to survive a few winters and hunting seasons.

“They do not get bigger and older,” Scullon noted, “by being stupid.”

We see that antlered head as majestic. Female deer see it as signaling the best prospect for siring strong fawns.

Which is why that tall crown likely is more for show than defense. If meant for protection, bucks would keep antlers beyond early winter, and the expanding antlers would not be so tender through the summer.

“It is for social status, for hierarchy among the herd,” Scullon said.

Sure, deer do use the antlers to combat with other bucks during rut. But even then, the bucks often go through a ritual sizing up, striding as if in tandem, to gauge if one has an obvious advantage that could settle the matter before it comes to a battle that may leave one or both injured.

“Fighting is a high-risk activity,” Scullon explained.

Also, if antlers were for defense, the females would have them as well. Yet among all deer species, only reindeer and caribou have antlers on both sexes.

Again, it makes sense. Does have something more important to focus their energies, and calcium, on — their fawns, both before and after giving birth.

Female reindeer and caribou, however, live in harsh northern regions where winter forage can be scarce. So the females grow antlers for the same reasons the males do: to establish a social pecking order in the herd, but in this case for the better grazing sites, according to an article by Craig Roberts for BBC Wildlife Magazine.

And while male reindeer and caribou will shed antlers in late autumn, females keep them until spring, to better ensure they can hold on to those prime food sites through winter while pregnant. It’s led some to quip that Santa’s team — usually depicted with antlers — must be all female.

A interesting thought — but Roberts says probably not. “In fact, most of the reindeer used to pull sleds are castrated males — they are easier to handle, and have antler cycles similar to those of the females,” he states in the article.