D Rock

My dad and I revisited the gut pile of the buck I shot a week and a half ago found the stomach matter was the only thing left after the yotes got a hold of everything else. We decided to poke around to see what he was eating on and found 50 to 60 red oak acorns. This is suprising because the red oak is supposed to be bitter compared to the white oak. We have plenty of both around but this year the white oaks didn't do as well as the red oaks. So will the deer eat whatever they can or has anyone experienced deer eating red oak over white oak? Let me know what you think.

uncle matt

The white oak's mast is certainly sweeter that the red oak's. Deer do know this and will eat the white over the red 9 times out of ten (assuming that the two trees are right next to each other).

But white's don't drop every year like the red's do so of course deer eat red oak acorns.

Try them both sometime, you can really taste the difference yourself.

We used to dump our deer guts down in a meadow behind our apple orchard and wait for the coylotes and blast tham with the '06. Sometimes you'd bang one down and the others wouldn't scatter much and just come right back to eating. They would even eat out paper towels.

JagMagMan

Given the choice, they will choose white oak over red oak acorns anytime!

alsaqr

The deer around here prefer white oak acorns over all others. i just started fertilizing some big white oak trees on our place.