I just read NickW's post again and in there, " The California Records of Big Game(CRBG) Calls the central deer "inland blacktails." This cluster encompasses most of Northern California from the western edge of the Sacramento Valley, east to the Sierra Crest and from about the city of Redding, south to near Fresno."
OK, what they are calling the "inland Blacktail", we have been calling the Hybrid or "cross bred" bucks for years. Some guys up North call them "Benchlegs".
In any event, same critter, mostly Blacktail with some muley potentially mixed in. Very common and anybody that sees one up close, would never mistake it for a muley. At the same time, it should not be mistaken with the pure Blacktail deer either as the current BnC boundaries try to define.
They are hybrid deer and the way that they have been treated as such in the record books has been good enough for me but i can understand that some tremendous examples of hybrids, looking nothing like muley bucks, have been taken yet could not compete with our pure strain of muleys in the records books. So, i guess a new classification was invented, not sure if i agree with it or not.
Joey
"It's all about knowing what your firearms practical limitations are and combining that with your own personal limitations!"