Rangers remind visitors to leave shed antlers alone. Courtesy/NPS
Male elk shed their antlers in spring. Courtesy/NPS
BANDELIER News:
One of the signs of spring in the Jemez Mountains is male elk and deer shedding their antlers. People like to collect these ”sheds”, which is fine on private land or areas administered by the Bureau of Land Management or the US Forest Service. However, it is illegal on the Valles Caldera National Preserve or Bandelier National Monument, or other National Park Service areas.
Bandelier has been a National Park Service unit since 1932 and Valles Caldera since 2015. Federal regulations forbid the removal of any park property, which not only includes antlers, but also bones, skulls, rocks, flowers, and artifacts like arrowheads, pot sherds, and old bottles and cans. In fact, someone caught collecting antlers or other items protected by law in Bandelier or the Valles Caldera Preserve can be fined, or even barred from the area for life.
Most national park units are considered “living museums,” where everything in the park is important to the story that is told there or to the natural functioning of the park’s ecosystem. Shed antlers left on the ground provide an important source of minerals for many small animals. Antlers are bone and are mainly composed of calcium. Humans need calcium to keep their bones and teeth strong and growing normally; so do wild animals.
Humans eat a variety of foods, like milk, cheese, ice cream and leafy green vegetables, to get the calcium they need. For wildlife, calcium is harder to obtain. Small mammals, like mice, voles, chipmunks, and ground squirrels, get calcium by gnawing on shed antlers and animal bones. Antlers left on the ground help these animals survive.
Although the gathering of a few antlers is thought to have little real impact on a park, with thousands of visitors coming to an area, or perhaps a few people illegally gathering quantities of antlers for commercial purposes, the effect can be large. As one park official said, ”The unchecked collection of hundreds of pounds of antlers can make a difference to wildlife that depend on them, and their absence takes away from the wild character of the park that visitors come to enjoy. Physically and philosophically, it does make a real difference.”