That is all
😎😎😎

Why?

They're pretty bitter if you don't cook them right.

The way we typically hunt in Texas from fixed positions over a fixed feeder make it difficult in certain years. The deer don't disappear into another dimension. They are just somewhere else than visiting your feeder. Also sometimes to often we are limited by property boundaries. We can't go to where the deer are congregating.

Yeah but in years they don't make, like this year where I am... I normally shoot every deer I see on my home place. Rather eat them than pay the car insurance deductible after my wife hits one. Local white oaks dropped lightly and early. Now deer are hungry. Most years we might shoot two off the corn pile. This year we killed enough in a couple weeks i started to feel bad. Anymore deer get killed by us this year won't be here at home.

I love White Oak acorns because they're one of those things deer love to eat the most. Find a White Oak that's dropping acorns and if there are deer in the area you'll see one if you wait long enough.

Reminds me of an old timer I hunted with as a kid who would pick up White Oak acorns from under a tree in his yard to scatter in his food plot. He would often take enough acorns to almost fill a gallon bucket. He killed a lot of deer that way too.

I hunted National Forest for years and would always laugh when people complained about deer not coming to feeders because of all the acorns.
And yes, I would always hunt around white oak trees. Deer will travel a long ways to get to white oak acorns.

I love anything that gets my deer off protein feed for a while.

I put a trail cam on an oak tree in front of the house for security purposes.

I caught this crew scoping out the place while getting a midnight snack of acorns.





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White Oak acorns have lower levels of tannic acid which makes them taste sweeter to deer. A TPWD biologist once told me that when comes to a deer's diet, they're the closest thing to ice cream.

I can remember when I hunted a property with a lot of oaks, watching deer walk by piles of corn. Every deer I shot was full of acorns. The place I hunt now has maybe one oak tree, and there are a few on the neighbor's property.

I hunt public land. Therefore, I LOVE acorns. Probably for the reason you hate them.

Makes you wonder why more folks don't pickup acorns in their yard or other places and scatter them at their feeder.

I don't remember where I read it a few years back, but there was an article talking about how deer will only eat acorns native to their home area. We have many large live oak trees where we live and we have raked up gallons worth and taken them 3 hours to where we hunt. They will literally sit and rot on the ground around our feeders before the deer will eat them. Seems the hogs like them well enough, but I have witnessed deer eating corn and ignoring the non native acorns, so maybe there was some truth to the article I read.

It's been my observation that deer will eat white oak, red oak and finally, if they're hungry enough, live oak acorns in that order. I've been told that the red oaks need to sit and leach out the tannins before the deer will eat them. That's why they get hit in January or February. If there on red oaks in December then I bet food is getting scarce. If they're eating live oaks they're close to starving. jmho.

Are live oaks the big acorns? I usually see those sitting until they run out of the others.

I am a huge fan of acorns as nothing helps a deer but on weight as quickly as a big mast crop. Most every critter in the woods benefits from them including turkeys, coons, hogs, etc.
Adios,
Gary

Can’t worry about about what we can’t control. Our place is 80% dense to very dense cover and of that, over 90% is post, blackjack, and a few others kinds of oaks. We have a strong acorn crop every single year and have come to accept the benefits they provide to the animals outweigh the challenges they bring to hunting.

Even the squirrels aren't eating my corn.

Largest acorn crop I've think I might have ever seen, still dropping by the bushels

No. They're smaller acorns. Shell is sort of brownish, greenish yellow. Reds are a bit bigger and whites are bigger still with I think bur oak being the biggest. I believe burs are in the white oak family but don't quote me on that. Live oak acorns are longer than they are wide.

Thanks for that. I need to brush up on my acorn ID skills.

My land is almost total oaks. The wildlife pretty well ignore corn on a good year. This year was drought so the trees dropped their nuts too early.

The result is that more deer are coming to corn but are not as healthy as they are on natural browse and acorns.

Happy squirrels!

The two largest acorns are the burr oak and the overcup oak (very closely related). I have a very large burr oak in my front yard and the deer do not seem to like them at all. As others have said....I have had some success with collecting them and using them to attract pigs. I tries several times close to the feeder for deer...and nothing. But when I put a pile about 150 yards from the feeder...I was able to get a few pigs to stay around just long enough to get a shor. Don't worry about it too much with the day/night scope now.