When it walks, a deer seems almost to float. It moves silently into the woods, sometimes disappearing from sight in the blink of an eye. The whitetail is one of five members of the deer family living in Minnesota. The others are moose, elk, mule deer, and caribou. Parts of All Deer Antlers.
Male deer grow new antlers each year.
Two soft bumps begin growing on the head in the spring. They grow quickly but stay soft and tender until late summer. The antlers are covered with fuzzy skin, called velvet . Then the velvet dries, and the antler gets hard as bone. The male deer scrapes its hard antlers against trees to remove the velvet and expose the sharp points, called tines .