6 Native Foods Deer Can't Resist

6 Native Foods Deer Can’t Resist

Want to truly hone in on deer travel patterns? Find, then study these six native foods where you hunt.

Hunters constantly ask for quick-fix advice on food plots, because they want to know which foods offer the best nutrition for whitetails. Although their motives are genuine, they usually fail to see the big picture. Why? Because few consider the importance of good forestry practices when it comes to deer management.

Most whitetails need 6 to 10 pounds of food per day, so it’s easy to understand why large deer herds can quickly destroy habitat, particularly forests.

The natural foods whitetails prefer are region-specific. In mixed farm/forest settings, half of a whitetail’s diet should come from natural foods.

Deer eat more than 500 types of browse species. From a nutritional standpoint, most of them don’t contain much protein. In fact, crude protein levels are seldom higher than 4% to 9%. What natural foods lack in protein, they more than make up for by supplying energy and meeting a whitetail’s other nutritional needs.

Like people, whitetails have definite likes and dislikes, and they will consume a high volume of natural foods if they are available. The challenge for biologists, foresters and landowners is to keep the habitat and deer population in balance so that the quality of both the deer herd and natural habitat remains high.

Native Foods for Whitetails

What follows is a list of natural foods deer eat. All are important to a whitetail’s health and the forest ecosystem.

  1. Forbs/weeds. Of the hundreds of forbs, few are preferred by whitetails. However, some forbs are highly nutritious and easily digestible, and deer eat these plants at certain times of the year.
  2. Grasses. A whitetail consumes large amounts of grass in spring. After summer arrives, grasses become stalky and high in fiber, which causes deer to shy away from eating them.
  3. Mast crops. Acorns and apples are season-specific and highly preferred by whitetails. Although low in protein — 4% to 7% — mast is a great source of carbohydrates, which are needed for daily energy demands. However, mast production is cyclical and it’s not always available no matter how good a management program is.
  4. Mushrooms. These fleshy, spore-bearing fungus growths are highly nutritious. However, like many natural foods, their window of availability is short. Mushrooms require a lot of moisture, so the crop might be limited during dry years.
  5. Lichens. These are slow-growing plants that typically form a crusty, leaflike appearance. Lichens are a combination of fungus and algae. They grow on trees and rocks and are an excellent source of trace minerals. Although deer eat lichens year-round, Northern whitetails consume them more heavily during winter.
  6. Browse. Of all natural foods, whitetails are most dependent on browse, which is made up of leaves and buds. In studies conducted at my deer enclosure, I’ve found that protein levels appear to have little bearing on the types of browse whitetails prefer. For example, during spring green-up, my whitetails prefer wild apple, ash, and basswood browse, which have protein levels of 3.8%, 4.8% and 6.1%, respectively. The less-preferred leaves of American beech, striped maple and wild black cherry have protein levels of 7.4%, 9.8% and 13.4%, respectively.

6 Native Foods Deer Can't Resist

Deer don’t always choose the most nutritious leaves, at least not when it comes to protein levels. Many animal nutritionists believe deer gravitate to certain browse species because of factors like palatability and sugar and fiber levels.

The Bottom Line

Whitetails require several kinds of natural foods to meet their nutritional needs, and a sustainable forest is necessary to meet those needs.

Charles Alsheimer (1947-2017) was America’s foremost authority on white-tailed deer behavior. He served as a Deer & Deer Hunting field editor for nearly 40 years.

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