In your opinion, what's the top 5 food sources for a deer throughout the year. I'm interested to hear what everyone has to say.
That probably depends on where you live, what is available and what time of the year you are talking about. For me early season in Indiana its soybeans, green plantings, acorns, beechnuts and natural browse.
Where I'm at in PA it is beans, acorns, and apples early on and moves to corn towards mid season and then everything is pretty much fair game in late season.
Obvious choices like acorns, apples, soy beans, sunflower heads aren't available throughout the year, so while they are probably top on the desired menu, they arent what the deer are mainly basing their diet on. I thought I read some study where a foraging deer ate over 40 different plants while grazing thru the woods. They love poison ivy and grape vines, and grass.
As the others have stated, it will vary depending on your location and time of year. In the Midwest, during the spring and summer months they focus on protein foods such as clover, alfalfa and soybeans. Once fall arrives they will switch to more carb high-energy foods like acorns, apples, persimmons and corn. Deer will feed on a variety of mast, leaves and grasses but my top picks would be clover, acorns, soybeans, corn and apples.
Acorns, muscadines, clover, succulent plants or natural browse. I'm lucky enough to hunt in a part of Georgia that is covered up with acorn producing white oaks and that's why I listed them as my first choice. In the spring and summer months muscadines an other small berry producing vines are everywhere, making great places to pop up a blind when you find a trail during the early season along these small fruit vine thickets until the cold snap kills em off about the start of gun season. And never want to forget the small succulent plants that grow through out the woods naturally that are in everyone's hunting no matter where you are...unless you hunt in the Arctic Circle. And clover food plots....mmmm I love me some clover food plots....
I would have to agree with fitz. That's why I asked the question. most of the places I hunt, that's what I experience. I think location has to do with it, but I also think pressure does too. It's hard for me to pass up a nice stand of oak trees and I would love to hunt some nice crop fields but that's not usually what works for me
