Watching deer feed.

                               

A buck like this one needs lots of food before and after the rut.

Whitetail are amazing animals, and it's always a treat to watch a mature deer eat. I've watched them come for 300 yards through the woods, and it's quite an experience to really watch them feed on natural browse.

They move slowly, head up and down as they look for danger, but the head is constantly moving. They will pick up one or two freshly fallen acorns, take a few steps, and down goes the head to chew the top off a freshly growing tiny tree or the top off a potato..

They bite at a shrub, swipe another bite off some lower tree limbs, go down to the ground for another bite of greenery, and on they come. Wildlife biologists tell us that a mature whitetail will eat a bushel of browse every day. A bushel of browse could weigh six to 10 pounds.

It takes a lot of food to keep an adult healthy and growing good antlers.

Start plucking stems of grass or winter wheat, aspen buds, twigs, tops of bushes and shrubs, and it takes a good bit of feeding to come anywhere close to a bushel of browse. Deer have to work hard to earn their dinners.

There are many things deer will eat and only some things they won't. There are catholic in their appetite, and this means they will eat almost anything. A friend lives in East Tawas, and a small city park is across the street from him, and it's a winter hangout for the animals.

Deer live in the park, and start feeding on their neighbors shrubs once the sun goes down. He often has to shoo them out of his front yard because they are nibbling on his ornamental shrubs.

There is nothing new in the fact that more deer live and feed on private property than on federal or state land, and one reason for that is that much of what deer eat during the summer and fall are truck crops. Alfalfa, beans, cabbage, carrots, clover, corn, oats, potatoes, pumpkins, rape, rutabagas, rye, rye grass, sugar beets, winter wheat and much more.

Deer live where they have an immediate access to food most of the year. What they don't find in Farmer Jones' crop fields can be found as they browse through the woods. Acorns are a constant source of food when this mast crop is good, and deer also eat beechnuts and leaves off some berry bushes.

Deer always seem to feed. They may lay up during the day, but every hour or so, they will stand up, walk around, browse on whatever tasty is found nearby, and then lay back down. An hour or so later they will repeat this process.

One of the major secrets to deer hunting is the same as is true with ruffed grouse hunting. Find the food and you'll find the animals. Some hunters have never had to learn what deer feed on in the wild. Knowledge of those food sources is what can spell success.

In season, deer feed avidly on apples, aspen buds and twigs, dogwood, hawthorn, red maple, white pine, sugar maple, sumac, viburnum, white cedar, yellow birch and other natural growing ground and tree forage. Deer that feed on a wide variety of wild and farm-grown foods are most likely to adapt best to a bad winter.

Often, in parts of the Upper Peninsula, snow gets so deep that whitetails are confined to deer yards. Most of these deer yards are visited year after year, regardless of how high the browse line may be.

A high browse line means that younger deer cannot reach the meager food supply offered in a yarding area, and the younger animals often starve.

Hunters who spend time outdoors should learn their wild deer foods, and when winter snows fall, some deer will still be found prowling the woods to feed on these desired foods until the snow gets too deep to move around in.

This fall, it's nice to have food plots plants, but it's the savvy hunter that knows where deer go when it comes time to forage for their food/ Those sportsmen will be one step ahead of other hunters.

Title: Watching deer feed.

Tags: ((Dave, Richey, Michigan, outdoors, what, deer, eat, truck, crops, natural, browse, acorns, beechnuts, twigs))

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors