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bucks grouped ip

Yesterday on my way out to haul trash. I'd imagine they're about as sick of the ice as I am now.
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BSK said:
My local bucks definitely started to group back up by mid-December.
Click to expand...
Mine also began grouping back up in mid-December (Stewart Co.).
However, about the only time ANY deer were visiting our fields & food plots was after dark. Near zero daylight observations of any adult deer in food plots & fields.

We killed 2 does in last week of season, and both had stomachs full of acorns & honeysuckle. Never mind there was nearby standing corn and some nice winter wheat fields. No corn, no wheat in their stomachs.

The deer are just now starting to hit the fields and food plots more during daylight.
We just had a large area with a huge surplus of acorns (many didn't even fall until mid-December), and the amount of young honeysuckle in some 2 to 5-yr-old clear-cuts has been unprecedented.

I'm sure many areas (even parts of Stewart Co.) didn't have such an abundance of acorns and young honeysuckle. But for us, time & money of food plots was near a total waste of time & money.
 
TheLBLman said:
Mine also began grouping back up in mid-December (Stewart Co.).
However, about the only time ANY deer were visiting our fields & food plots was after dark. Near zero daylight observations of any adult deer in food plots & fields.
Click to expand...
Same. Almost all activity in plots at night.

TheLBLman said:
We killed 2 does in last week of season, and both had stomachs full of acorns & honeysuckle. Never mind there was nearby standing corn and some nice winter wheat fields. No corn, no wheat in their stomachs.

The deer are just now starting to hit the fields and food plots more during daylight.
We just had a large area with a huge surplus of acorns (many didn't even fall until mid-December), and the amount of young honeysuckle in some 2 to 5-yr-old clear-cuts has been unprecedented.

I'm sure many areas (even parts of Stewart Co.) didn't have such an abundance of acorns and young honeysuckle. But for us, time & money of food plots was near a total waste of time & money.
Click to expand...
For some strange reason, our deer were on the plots from day one and never stopped, even with a near record-breaking acorn crop. But then we've never had such productive clover plots as this year.
 

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BSK said:
For some strange reason, our deer were on the plots from day one and never stopped, even with a near record-breaking acorn crop. But then we've never had such productive clover plots as this year.
Click to expand...
For us (and I'm talking on thousands of acres, not just a few hundred) we had an incredible production of very widespread young honeysuckle in some 2 to 8-yr-old clear-cuts. These brushy clear-cuts might as well have been soybean or cornfields.

I suspect much of these food sources will more or less disappear in the next couple years as the trees become bigger, little sun will hit the ground, and the deer may become a bit more acorn-driven in terms of herd health (or lack thereof). And to add to this, most of our larger oaks will be cut this spring, so fewer acorns in next many years.

But in fall/winter 2023, the deer would feed every afternoon, and into the night on acorns, then lay around for many hours chewing their cud (acorns take a very long time to digest), then move around in brushy areas eating honeysuckle a bit during the day, then back to acorns late afternoon, to repeat this daily cycle.

Occasionally, some might venture into a food plot or field, but it was obvious they had more than enough to eat without every exposing themselves to the dangers of being out "in the open". It wasn't a hunting pressure thing so much as just the normal ingrained behavior of deer (especially where coyotes and dogs exist). And I'm afraid, the future only holds more coyotes and more dogs.
 

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