Travel & Leisure Facts and Notes

The physical evidence of deer browsing on leaves, twigs, agricultural crops and natural fruits represents a unique type of deer sign. It adds one more piece to the puzzle and confirms that an area deserves your closed scrutiny. An area rich in food should also support a herd of deer. If you cannot find evidence of feeding within an area, it may still serve as a travel corridor for deer, but you will have to find other signs, such as tracks and trails, to confirm this.

To find evidence of feeding, you need to know what deer eat, which includes more than 6-different plants. As browsing animals, they randomly nip off small leaves, twigs and buds of many trees and shrubs. In northern forests, white cedar, maples, dogwood, aspen and blueberry are important natural foods. In the south deer prefer greenbriers, black gum, maples, honeysuckle, sumac and kudzu. Generally they prefer new growth. In starvation times, however, deer will eat pencil-thick stems.

Across whitetail country, the acorns of oak trees remain a key food source from late summer through winter. Fifty-four different species of oaks grow in North America, and almost every species produces acorns of value to deer. Botanists divide all oaks into two groups, white oaks and black oaks. In general, the white oaks produce “sweeter acorns”, while black-oak acorns are somewhat bitter. Deer demonstrate preference for the very sweetest whites, such as the chinquapin, the post and swamp white oak. On the other hand, black oaks produce acorns more consistently than white oaks, and deer eat black-oak acorns in years when white oaks do not bear fruit.

Squirrels shuck the shell of the acorn. Deer, on the other hand, eat acorns whole so the physical signs of such a meal are subtle. If you look close, you may detect some disturbance in leaf litter affiliated with deer, or you may come across some tracks in exposed dirt underneath oaks. Parallel wind rows of leaves usually suggest feeding activity of wild turkeys. With snow cover, you can easily discover where deer have pawed down to find acorns.

Essential agricultural crops that deer use include corn, soybeans, apples and alfalfa. Deer eat these foods in many different stages. In an apple orchard, for instance, deer will graze on apple twigs in addition to eat the fruit itself. In a cornfield, deer will nip off the tops of the stalk and silk as well as the mature ear. When encountering shelled corn, they will chow down with relish. Frequently they will also carry a cob of corn with them as they leave a feeder or field.

Deer lack incisor teeth in the front of the upper jaw; hence they cannot nearly “bite” off stems. Rather, a deer used its lower canine teeth to press a stem or leaf against the upper jaw and then tears off a mouthful. The remaining stem or leaf shows a jagged edge. By contrast, neatly-pruned stems low to the ground indicates rabbit activity. Broken branches of apple and cherry trees generally represent the work of a bear. When you find broken-down stalks of corn, blame the raccoon. Deer are dainty eaters by comparison.