Most of us who garden have a love-hate relationship with deer, affectionately referred to as the “hooved marauders” or some other term I can’t write here.
Try as we might to keep them out of our plants, we must remember they were here first, and we are the interlopers who keep putting out delectable salad buffets for their enjoyment.
Deer cause the most damage in the growing season when there is a lot of fresh growth to sample. Deer can also do a lot of damage in the winter, especially when we get lots of snow that buries their food sources.
During the growing season white-tailed deer, the most common deer in our area, will browse on a wide range of leafy green plants and shrubs, grasses and wild forges. They will sample almost anything, especially the young fawns.
As summer winds down and we start moving into cooler weather, the deer begin to eat vegetation with more carbohydrates and fats that help them build up their reserves for the winter. They switch to eating more woody twigs and vegetation that is high in fiber.
This is possible because along with their unique four-chamber stomach, their gut microbiome shifts with the onset of winter, allowing otherwise difficult to digest woody material to be broken down. As deer eat, they chew their food only enough to swallow it into the first compartment of their stomach. They then retreat to a protected area to rest and regurgitate the food to chew it more thoroughly and move it through the stomach sections.
In the winter, deer will browse anything they can reach even when it means standing on their hind legs to reach a tasty branch. When we get a deep snow they can stand on top of, they can easily browse twigs 6 to 7 feet off the ground. When we have a long harsh winter with deep snow, they will browse almost anything, including ponderosa pine tips and rhododendrons. They find arborvitae hedges particularly tasty, leaving the plants looking like popsicles with bare lower trunks.
Your best protection from winter deer browsing is to fence off the tastier shrubs with polypropylene or wire fencing and spray vulnerable plants with deer repellent. I keep a small spray tank filled with repellent handy for when I do a winter garden walkabout to reinforce the message that these plants are mine.
Plants that have been browsed by deer will have the branch tip chewed off in a ragged pattern as opposed to winter cold damage where the tip bud is still intact.
Should you feed deer in the winter? Wildlife specialists say no. Because of their winter stomach chemistry, deer can’t digest alfalfa hay or corn that people put out for them, thinking they are helping. As hard as it seems for those of us with soft hearts, a deer can die of starvation with a full stomach of alfalfa or corn. The best rule is to let nature take its course.
