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We have pretty deep snow here in Northern WI. Is there a problem in starting to give the deer some baled hay at this time of year? They are deep in browse mode. Is hay digestable at this time of year? They are still pawing in the areas blown out by the wind.

It's digestible but only if their digestive microflora adapt first. You need to start feeding in very small amounts and slowly work up over several weeks. If they eat too much to start with, it can't be digested. You need to read up on it as my knowledge isn't enough to do it right.

We've gone out and dropped some trees during a hard winter before. They will eat the buds that they normally couldn't reach.

Also read an article a few years that touched on this. The conclusion was that feeding hay does more harm than good unless they are used to eating it.

In good habitat, white-tailed deer going into winter should be carrying enough fat reserves that, energetically, they really don't need to take another bite until some time in April. In the northern parts of their range, they basically find habitat that allows them to minimize heat loss--places that provide protection against wind and an overhead canopy to mitigate heat loss to the night sky. In the areas where I worked up north, deer would spend most of their time in sheltered places like sumac thickets and eat sumac (which had virtually no real nutritional value) to keep from feeling hungry. This also kept their rumen microflora and microfauna alive.

Supplementing them with coarse supplemental forage such as hay really doesn't help and, as Rock Chuck mentioned, it can cause them more harm than good. What protein and energy there is in hay is pretty much all tied up behind the lignin in the cell walls and a deer's digestive system is not set up to effectively get at it. Providing more nutritious and digestible forage (such as alfalfa) probably doesn't hurt, but most deer really don't need it. They're living off the fat that they stored up in the fall.

We had a heavy, wet snow in the middle of November that flattened most of the brush around here providing the deer with a foodsource they normally don't have and boy, are they taking advantage of it!

The snow is getting deep, but with the additional browse provided by the flattened brush, they should make it through. It has been a blessing for the deer under such deep snow conditions.....

A good old January thaw would go a long ways to making sure that happens!!

A deer has the microflora necessary to digest hay in it's stomach but not in sufficient quantities to do the job. It needs a couple weeks with just a little hay to give the bugs time to multiply. If they've been eating grass, using grass hay will speed things up considerably but I still wouldn't go whole hog on feeding them.

It won't be digested. It will be masticated and passed on through. It can't stay in the rumen long enough to do them any good. The passage time is too short. They will eat some grasses when they first break dormancy, but after the first 4-6 weeks of growth, digestible nutrition value declines to just about zero.

And if one starts feeding, he will never get rid of them in subsequent winters. Youngsters will have learned that the feed lot and surrounding ground are where they are supposed to winter.

Game folks fed on the edge of town here in about 1993. Up until that time, one could raise gardens, shrubs were fine, as were folks hedges and fruit trees. Since then, we have year round deer, can not grow a garden with out a high fence, and the complete town has a browse line up to about 5 1/2 feet. They are a year round pain in the ass.

They yard up in our cedar swamps. We also do some small scale timber stand improvements, cutting mostly maple, and they browse hard there for a long time. But that project is quite a ways away from the deer my dad was considering giving the hay.
Thanks for the input!

Do this, I cut close to a hundred soft maples the last couple of days, and the deer are hitting them already.

Heed what Mudhen is saying. Deer can have a full stomach of hay and still starve to death.

Don't know what county you are in, but be aware that in some counties you can't feed deer.

Several years ago when the CO, Game department tried feeding deer,they actually found deer starved to death and having full bellies of hay.They developed a special processed pellet for them and also for the elk. Although elk can do well on hay.

Here in CO ,it is illegal to feed any wildlife.Since they congregate into close big herds, the spread of CWD is made worse.

There is a big push to raise money in the Gunnison Valley at present to buy feed. The CPW will not feed and te snow is 5+ ft deep,covering any food.We might have a big die off this winter.

Of course , besides the possibility of disease spread, the CPW is saying they have no money which helps their push to raise resident license fees double for 2017.

Illegal in Montana

Illegal in ID, too.
Last winter a bunch of elk died in Sun Valley when they got on the golf course and ate yew bushes. All parts of yew are highly toxic. The city council was considering outlawing all new plantings of yew but I never heard how it came out.

I often see big old bucks breeding in late January with hips and ribs showing pretty prominently while Im out "working to save deer" (coyote hunting, but folks love to hear of hunters giving back).

The does will look to be in good shape. I cant help but to put out some alfalfa in several places. They usually wont mess with it if they havent been around it for quite some time. I throw small patches around water holes. Often its 2 years before they start nibbling at it as if letting gut flora adapt and then only after all green growth is well gone. The desert muleys here wont mess with apples either unless you keep them around for 2 or 3 years either.

Where they have gotten used to it from previous winters they will hit it well, early in the winter.

I figure starvation for big older bucks isnt all its cracked up to be and i am nowhere near any cultivation areas where i notice the deer populations are greater and bucks generally bigger than in the boonies.

If deer can travel a couple of miles from mountain top to alfalfa fields in Co and NM i figure those in the desert deserve some candy.

Depending on where you live, you might want to consider that lots of deer in your back yard may draw a cougar to your back yard.

Illegal in NY also

Plant food plots, wheat or oats, we feed protein year around

Yea, I planted some oats as a cover crop for new grass in the pasture this year. Almost had to go out and direct deer traffic there were so many

Oats are certainly the most favored winter crop on small "ranches" in Central Texas. They ensure that you will have deer on your property, no matter how small it may be.

I have a 1/4 acre at the house, deer are in it every afternoon.

The whitetail are hitting our haystacks and feed yard big time in the last month.


We live on the edge of town and I noticed mule deer tracks on the front yard yesterday morning. That is a first since we moved here 6 years ago. The uber cold snap and snow got 'em in close.

Not totally true it is legal in Sullivan County where I hunt. We have not tried to use hay or alfalfa as they are low in protein . We on occasion during only the most severe winters will supplement with grains along with our annual trimming of fruit trees on our properties . Our woods have been in a rotational logging program for around 5 years now and this usually takes place during the winter months so browse is relatively everywhere. This is especially helpful when the snow has an ice crust on it that is not penetrable.

I have land in Price co . Wis . so I am interested in this subject. I dont think feeding the deer is a good idea this late in the year. If they are not in good enough shape now, they most likely are a weaker gene pool and sometimes I think this is mother natures way of keeping the toughest , healthiest deer in the herd. It also may over populate with s subsistence of food and over browse some tree species. In Price co. there is not a cedar tree that is not 50 yrs old. White pine get browsed to death there. The neighbors feed them all the time too , thinking a hay bale is going to help when the winter gets long. I believe their best friend id a chainsaw this time of year, and next year there will be young poplars by the millions . This is what we need in northern WIs, Mi. and Minn. One time I found a dead fawn buck in March on my neighbors yard up north. There was nothing wrong with it , no bullets , no nuthing. I can only conclude it ate too much grass cause of a very fast snow melt that year. It was a time when there were just too many deer and little browse in the woods. You are most likely better off leaving them alone, or shoot a coyote. Later, Ihookem. Also, the snow is getting deep in some places but the winter will most likely be a short one and 40 degree temps are called for most of this week. It is summer time for those deer. Laying in the sun with those coats, you could put a thermometer on their backs and it would be 70 in the sun.

Sam, it would be interesting to see if you start finding big bellied dead w tails in the area. Grass hay?

I have read years ago where in deer yards in the north with red cedar, deer would starve to death with bellies full in bad winters.

There are grass bales but of course they walk past those and chew out the centers of the alfalfa bales.

The welfare whitetail eat alfalfa all summer and fall out in the field so they must be conditioned to it?

Hell if I know but they love the alfalfa.

And they love to eat pea/wheat pellets out of an open ended storage shed as well.

Only dead ones I ever see are laying in the road ditch.

I always laugh when I hear folks say deer don't eat grass. Tell that to the 12 head in my grass hay field right now. And not eating alfafa is even worse. While they for sure have preferred foods their rumen can absolutely adjust over time. It is the same process as cattle new to a feedlot. Cattle don't start off with high grain or alfalfa diets either, not if you want to have a low death loss anyway.

Most of the grass deer eat probably is new spring growth or fall regrowth, but they eat a ton of it and do well. We had a good fall here so that fall regrowth under the snow is what they are eating on my place. And I have a lot of browse here too.

Alfalfa is a forb, not grass, forbs and browse are usually listed as their preferred diet. But rapid changes in diet especially during stressful times are bad. Even if changes are among the same class of plants but different species.

Decent alfalfa hay is very high in protein and good alfalfa is sky high with it. That's why dairys feed so much of it. Grains can be pretty high but are usually high in energy too. New grasses can be high. The deer around here chase cheatgrass every spring and fall and it is because if you test it while it is young and green it'll be 10-15% protein. This is in an area with lots of browse.

Lignin is more abundant in woody browse species than grasses and forbs so they can handle it.

You also have to consider what's in the plant that makes it unpalatable, toxins, secondary compounds, even lignin and cellulose. Some browse species have decent protein and energy, but also tannins or terpenes that llimit digestion.

Yes starving animals will eat anything but I see wildlife all the time with many choices that are doing well ignoring the rules that my friends at the game and fish set for them.

The ethics of feeding wildlife is a different discussion.

Several counties of Missouri as well

No feeding and no salt/minerals

Thanks Sam. Im not figuring they will starve on alfalfa. Mulies dont.

A person can put alfalfa under a corn feeder and get the whitetails used to it. After all the vegetation is winter kklled the bucks will come to green alfalfa from miles away.
Of course, they will probably come in to it after dark, but at least they are in the area.

They need time to develop the bacteria in their stomachs to digest any feed. If they've had alfalfa during the summer and fall, they have what they need.

CPW just put a blurb on their web site that they are going to start feeding deer in the Gunnison valley,but this will be the prepared feed they developed years ago, not straight grass for the deer.

Alot of the prob isn't what they might eat, it seems that it is how much, once an animal is empty and starving, if you introduce an instant food source they will gorge so full it won't digest and they are plugged from end to end and thus will die with full stomachs!! Introduced slowly you might get by in very small quantities to start out!! MAYBE!!!

Took a ruminant nutrition class from the guy that wrote the book (Church). One of his favorite phrases was that one could run them on newspaper, nitrogen fertilizer, and a few minerals if a person seriously watched what he was doing. Fairly plastic diets among all of the species, but single source feeds and sudden switches do not work well.

Non ruminants like horses can get by on poor groceries by simply eating more and pushing it through. One can look at horse poop and often identify the components.

Ruminants have to digest their food or it will not move down the tract. Mostly the digestion is done by micro-flora (bacteria and protozoa) with the animal absorbing generated gases and then subsequently digesting the bugs. If anything kills the bugs or the groceries are so poor the bugs can't survive, everything stops.

The OP though is solely related to a toxic issue.

Idaho Fish and Game has just started feeding elk and deer about 50 miles north of here to protect ranchers' hay stacks and to keep them off the highways. They've developed a special feed pellet that can be digested. I haven't been able to find any info on what they have in it but it has to contain bacteria that can do the job.

Gunnison Basin is always the first place CPW feeds. Mostly to keep them out of haystacks and off the Hwy 50.

As I mentioned in another thread, from the ungulates standpoint, most harsh winters are preceeded by harsh summers (drought) and the ungulates go into the winter in poor shape. That's not the case this year, critters had a pretty good summer and fall. Remember, we had a very late and warm fall.

Also, deer (and elk) survived the 70's in the Gunnison Basin with higher snow totals and MUCH colder temps than they are currently seeing.

In the harsh winter of 83-84 we fed for the CPW on our ranch. They provided the feed and we provided the labor.

Fed a total of 40,000 lbs of deer pellets to upwards of 400 head of deer and 105 tons of moderately poor hay to upwards of 200 elk from late December to early April.

Casey

Winter of 83-84, an hour before feeding time.



Looking out the front door.