Lately I've been paying a little more attention to what types of wild forage there are in the woods this year. I'm in west central PA and have a little over 90 acres of mostly wooded property. So far I have seen wild grapes, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, dogwood berries and chestnut oak acorns (which is species of white oak). What I have not seen much of has been red oak acorns, beach nuts or hickory nuts and I have plenty of those types of trees as well. I have one surviving medium size American chestnut that I know of and it does have a few nuts again this year. I have not checked for wild cherries yet. The lack of red oak acorns is a little surprising as we have had bumper crops the past few years. I suppose that's actually a good thing if you're a deer hunter as the deer should be more predictable as far as where they are feeding.

The chestnut oaks are encouraging as I do have good numbers of those trees and most of them have acorns this year which has been really rare most years. Those trees are concentrated in one approximately ten acre area and I have several tree stands there already. They are also close to a small fruit tree orchard and there are lots of apples, pears and peaches this year.

I have also been seeing a four buck bachelor group on the camera in the orchard which is obviously encouraging and I'm already seeing some scrape activity near two of my stands. One of those is a community scrape that seems to get worked over throughout the year. It's under a small beech tree along the edge of an old overgrown field and it's been there so long that there's actually a bowl shaped depression several feet in diameter. In the nine years that I've owned the property there have been three respectable bucks taken from that one stand alone. I don't have a camera there yet this year mostly because I wasn't expecting to see any scrape activity this early.