A review of offerings at sporting goods stores reveals a myriad of products designed and marketed to attract deer to the hunter. Products, of course, fall into several categories, including food, dietary supplements, calls, decoys, musk and/or scents. Many of these products claim to deliver monster bucks for some unknown reason to anyone who applies them in the prescribed manner at the right time.

Although most products help a hunter increase their chances of success, this success is dependent upon the hunter understanding deer and how they react to nature and other influences. With this is mind, this article focuses on the various “supplemental” attractants used to attract white-tailed deer.

In Texas, it’s legal to hunt deer over a baited area, but hunting adjacent a feeder is not a perfect science. Deer will walk through scattered corn to get to a tree that is dropping acorns every time. Furthermore, deer may not even make themselves visible when habitat conditions are great – all while a mountain of corn grows under your feeder. (more…)

Very little research has been done with wildlife species in relation to the consequences of suboptimal nutrition conditions on estrous cyclicity and reproductive capability. White-tailed deer in Texas ideal for such research due to the reproductive seasonality and common reproductive failure when food quality and quantity is low. A research study out of Texas A&M University – Kingsville is studying the effects of reduced food intake on white-tailed deer estrous cyclicity through the evaluation of several specific nutritional measurements.

In the first year of the study, mature whitetail does were fed “all they could eat” on a high nutritional diet and bred. In the second year, doe diet was restricted from September through November and even up into mid-January and bred. (more…)

When considering the management of white-tailed deer, unless your property is game fenced you should realize that adjacent lands are also included in the home ranges of many of the deer on a ranch less than several thousand acres in size. Only those deer within the interior of a really large ranch may have home ranges located totally within the ranch, while those in a wide band around the ranch’s perimeter likely move back and forth onto adjacent lands. The quality of a ranch’s deer population will in large part be dependent on both the habitat quality and population management strategies (i.e. hunting pressure and deer harvest) on both your and neighboring lands.

The key to producing a productive and healthy white-tailed deer population is dependent upon the quantity, quality, and variety of food plants produced by the habitat or range. Food availability can be improved in the following ways:

1. Harvesting deer, including does, to maintain total deer numbers at or below the capacity of the habitat.

2. Stocking the range with a moderate number of domestic animals, preferably those that do not directly compete with wildlife, and utilizing some form of a deferred-rotation system of grazing.

3. Controlling invading “noxious” woody vegetation, such as excessive brush species that are not needed for cover. This will reduce competition between plants species and increase the production of grasses for cattle and the production and availability of browse and forbs preferred by deer. It is recommended that your property be a mosaic of 50-60% wooded/brush with the remainder in scattered openings and/or food plots.

4. Avoiding the stocking of excessive numbers of exotic big game animals or at least keeping their numbers at a low level, since exotics compete with white-tailed deer for browse, forbs, and mast. If you are really interested in producing trophy white-tailed deer, stay away from competing exotics.

(more…)

A ranch must be divided into at least two pastures before even the least complex two pasture/one herd deferred-rotation grazing system can be implemented. If not cross-fenced, the land manager would need to have access to other areas where livestock could be moved to during the prescribed rest periods. Electric fencing is a lower cost and less labor-intensive alternative to barbed wire for dividing a ranch into multiple pastures.

For a deferred-rotation grazing system to be most effective, all the pastures in the system should be more or less equal in size and/or have similar grazing capacities (e.g., pastures on the most productive, deep soils of a ranch would have higher livestock grazing capacities and should therefore be smaller than pastures on shallower, less productive soils). (more…)

What do deer eat? Deer eat mostly browse (leaves, twigs, shoots of woody plants and vines) and forbs (weeds and other broadleaf flowering plants). They do eat some grass, but only when it is young, green, and succulent. Sheep, goats, and exotic game species compete directly with the whitetail for preferred deer foods.

Deer food shortages usually occur during late summer and winter months. Adequate forage is usually available during the spring and fall seasons because of mild temperatures and increased rainfall. A variety of foods and habitat types is essential to good deer production and survival.

Deer eat a variety of plants, and different plant species become more important at different times of the year and importance can even vary year-to-year depending upon environmental conditions. The following plants are examples of some good deer foods which are readily eaten by deer when and where they are available. (more…)

It is commom knowledge that deer need food, water, shelter and space for survival. When a casual observer sees the countryside with abundant trees and plants it may appear that deer have plenty to eat. But that is not necessarily the case. First, some plants are not edible. Second, some plants are not palatable. And lastly, some are only availalbe at certain times of the year. White-tailed deer use three major plant groups as food.

They are: 1) forbs, which consists of broadleaf herbaceous weeds, 2) browse, which consists of leaves and tender twigs of woody plants, and 3) grasses. Deer flat-out prefer forbs, but these plants are normally available only in certain seasons and if rains do not come at the right time, they may not be available at all. (more…)

While white-tailed deer are ruminants like cows, but their diet selection is much different. Cattle are grass-roughage eaters, have a relatively large rumen compare to body size, and depend heavily on grasses for their diet. Grasses are relatively low in crude protein and digestibility when compared with legumes or forbs (broadleaf weeds).

Because of these nutritive parameters, grasses have a longer residence time in the cow rumen. Longer residence time increases rumen microflora (bacteria and protozoa) degradation and digestion of the forage. Thus, for grass-roughage eaters like cattle and sheep, residence time is quite long and rate of food passage is slow. (more…)

In some circles, you will still hear people talk about the old barren doe that lives in a particular part of the ranch. This line of thinking blames poor fawn production on the idea that many older does do not get pregnant. In reality, if the doe isn’t bred during the first estrous period, she will be receptive again 28 days later. This explains the high breeding success in white-tailed deer, even when bucks are scarce. It was recorded in one Texas study, that on average, 92 of every 100 does sampled were pregnant.

White-tailed deer are known for producing twins. In the previously mentioned study, over half of the does examined had twins. Triplets, however, were not common, and the occurrence of triplets was less than two percent. Quadruplets didn’t show up at all in the study. There were more male fetuses than female fetuses. Males represented 56 percent of the unborn fawns over the three years of the study.

(more…)