It very well could have been a whitetail that wrote the song about two front teeth.
QUESTION:This year, I shot an old buck – so old it had no front teeth. Is there some way I can tell how old it was?
ANSWER: It’s probably not as old as you think. A lot of people don’t realize that white-tailed deer have no upper incisors – front teeth. Some go years, possibly harvesting many deer before one day looking, and declaring, “It must be a very old deer.” Don’t feel bad; it’s a common mistake.
There are several ways to tell, or at least estimate the age of a deer, however. If you have a trail camera photo, you can sometimes at least put it into an age class (yearling, adult, mature or over-mature) using guidelines available online from several state wildlife agencies.
If you have the lower jaw from a deer, you can estimate age by tooth wear and replacement.
If you really want an accurate age, there are labs you can send a tooth to for accurate aging. They will cross-section the tooth and count layers of cementum annuli, much like you might count the rings on a tree.
— Recent Ask the Biologist Question: Natural Night Owls: Whitetails learn some behavior, but it takes millennia to change the nature of a species.Find Out The Answer!