Monday, February 05, 2007
Whitetails Will Eat Almost Anything
My 1,000 acres covers a bunch of ground in Osceola County, but it’s small when compared with some Texas ranches that cover several townships.
Even at that, feeding whitetail deer on a year ‘round basis costs a bunch of money. The more crops I can grow, the less it costs to feed the animals but I can’t afford enough food to feed all of the deer. That means that a bunch of feed has to be grown.
One might consider my operation as just one more large food plot. I’ve planted all kinds of crops including alfalfa, corn, Imperial Whitetail Clover, beans, corn, rape, rye, rye grass and winter wheat.
Corn is the major food that is grown here, and every year in October we try to get as much of the corn harvested before the rains come. Some years the fields get so muddy that it’s impossible to harvest the corn, and we wind up buying tons from other people. Sure, the deer will move through the mud and water to get to the standing corn but it’s a more efficient system to take the corn off and place it where needed.
We always put up as much second-cutting hay as possible, and it is high in protein and the deer love it during the winter months. One might wonder just where I’m going with this.
Deer need three things in life: food, water and abundant cover. My land has all of the above. Several ponds are scattered across my acreage, and the ponds are stocked with bass, bluegills and trout. A small stream flows in from a big beaver pond on adjoining property, and the creek and ponds solve any need for water.
My land is a generous mix of alder runs, cedar swamps, pines and an assortment of hardwood trees. I wish we had oaks for acorns, but they are missing from my land. There are huckleberry marshes, open fields, rolling hills, swamps, sumac clumps and nearly impenetrable wet plands.
Ranch deer have an abundance of thick cover. Much of it is considered good thermal cover for really harsh weather, and the deer have been utilizing the heavy cover during the current cold snap.
The third requirement is food. Deer have a catholic appetite, and will eat almost anything that grows. They wander through the woods nibbling on available browse of choice, and that natura food is subsidized by grain feedings of corn and other truck crops. Hay and corn and commercial deer foods are used during winter months.
If I could ask for other food sources it would be to have scattered oaks on the property. During good mast-bearing years, acorns provide deer with another wonderful source of nature food. The other alternative would be to plant a number of fruit trees.
Hunters who would like to duplicate my program on their land would be wise to make some food plots to augment a deer’s natural browse. Water is important to deer, and in many cases moisture from dew-damped browse sources provide an adequate amount of water.
It pays to mix up food sources. People who plant just clover are giving the deer some nutritious food. But it’s easy for deer to enter a field planted with clover, rape, chicory and other foods, and eat the crop down to nothing. A guy I know plants two or three acres to beans, and once they start to grow, the deer eat the beans down to the ground before shifting over to another food source. Once the beans start to grow again, the deer return.
A well-balanced diet of highly nutritious planted foods, the right mix of thin and thick cover, and a nearby source of water takes care of most of a deer’s needs. Should the local deer herd grow too large, and contain too many does, much of your efforts will be in vain.
To many deer in too small of an area causes stress. That, in turn, will cause damage to nearby food sources, and the deer can and will eat themselves out of a place to live.
Managing deer isn’t easy. If it were, the DNR wouldn’t have people mad at them all the time. Holding a deer population at a one buck-one-doe level means serious management, and that means taking excess does and letting the young bucks grow.
It’s much easier in theory than in practice.—The Whitetail Wizard
