Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Catman Oak Tree Identification

This is worth looking at. Oak trees have always been kind of confusing to me, and the books I have weren’t much help, probably because they usually use drawings. This is better.

His videos are good too, but not very Hollywood, if that’s what you like.


https://www.catmanoutdoors.com/southeastern-oak-trees-1

I was told that there are three main types of oak in Michigan. White oak with a rounded point and to think of the white man with a bullet, red oak with a squared point and to think of the red man with an arrowhead. Black oak with a less squared point and the black man with a spear. Most other oaks swamp oak, pin oak, scrub oak ect are variations of the three above. I’m sure from a botanist standpoint that explanation leaves a lot to be desired but from a practical hunting standpoint it’s a good start and easy enough to remember.

Tag!

Main thing I learned is that the red oak acorns take more than one season to mature, and that they can linger longer on the ground because of the extra tannin they have. Around here, in a good year you can hardly keep your feet in the woods for all the white oak acorns underfoot, until they get scarfed up by critters anyway. I knew they are preferred as food by people because they are less bitter. Survival Lily did an episode on how to get the tannin out of acorns to make them palatable, if anyone is feeling hungry🤢

He really went the extra mile with pics of old leaves on the ground, the differences between ones that grow in sun and shade, and pictures of bark on various sections of the trees.

If you’re serious about whitetail hunting,you need to know this...

I have all 3 types on my property. The Whitetails will clean up the acorns from White Oaks before they'll touch the others. The Black Oaks I have are sometimes called Elephant Oaks because their bark looks a lot like Elephant hide.

Looks like I have a Shumard Oak in what used to be a fenceline in my yard. Could have just about put my hand around the trunk when I moved here; now it’s a big SOB. The bark is pretty distinctive. Only oak that was here until I planted a Willow Oak and (I think) a Scarlet. All monsters after 30 years, and popular with the critters.

...or be a good apple-piler😜

Thank you for posting that, very informative.

Catman is good stuff

Deer here like White Oaks the best. The place I hunt has White,Post, Southern Red, and Blackjacks

Can be challenging as one often needs leaves, twigs, and acorns for definitive ID. I live in the west now, and if one can ID about 7 conifers, he's good to go for about 95% of what we have in the woods.

Still have my leaf collection from my WVa college days with 75 species therein.