Top 10 Native Plants for DEER

It's early April. Heading out in the backyard for a quick hike. Going to look at the top native plants for deer in our area. Hope you learn something here. Let's go. All right, so this plant right here is goldenrod and there's actually a ton of different types of goldenrod. I looked up on the internet. It said there's between 75 and 100 but they all flower at different times in the fall. They have a little bit different flowers, different growth structures, but they come up really early here in Ohio. This is one of them here. Just pop this out. They're super common. The deer actually have already been out hitting this this spring. They really like hitting goldenrod late summer, early fall. Right when the goldenrod starts to actually push flowers and bloom, I've noticed really big bucks a lot of times. You can find them in fallow fields, in meadows, things like that. Just gobbling down. They'll actually eat the whole seed head. I've seen that quite a bit. So that's just one of the more common ones here. It's also a good early successional species. It's just pretty common, pretty prolific. It's throughout the seed bank everywhere in the Midwest. All right, so these short kind of fuzzy guys, these are asters and there's tons of different species of aster. They bloom late summer, early fall. Not sure what it is about the asters, but white-tailed deer, specifically bucks, late summer and into maybe October, these things I guess are really palatable because I've seen tons of deer, tons of bucks using them and in fact I've seen whole bachelor groups grazing just over here behind me. Whole bachelor group came out in the evening and they were pretty much just sitting there mowing these things down. But super attractive and super common throughout the Midwest. Common early successional plant that is in the seed bank. You don't really have to plant it too often. All right, if you follow anything about deer habitat on the internet, you've probably heard about this plant right here. This is called switchgrass. It's a native warm season grass. It's very rigid, very hardy. It takes snow and ice and things like that really well and then pops right back up. So it's a really nice grass that offers good structure. This alone though is not great habitat, so you got to have diverse habitat mixed in with it. Just grass, there's not really a food component there for deer, so they got to have food and you got to have cover. But this is really good for structure and it offers really good cover. All right, so this is another really popular one for white-tailed deer. This is dogwood right here. I believe this is silky dogwood, very similar to the red ozer dogwood, but it's a really premium deer browse. They love browsing on these tips. Shockingly, this one doesn't have a lot of browse. There's a little bit of branches that I can tell have nipped off. So this area had a huge EHD kill last year and it really knocked the deer population back and I see a huge difference in what plants actually grow and pop up on the landscape. But dogwood's super good. This offers woody browse and there's also a berry component that flowers good for pollinator, really good for birds. But for deer, they like browsing on these woody stems. All right, so this one might not be popular with a lot of people, but if you love deer, this is a serious sleeper and it's a good one. This is actually a giant trellis of poison ivy. Poison ivy as a berry, but what the deer are eating is these branch tips and they've actually got this one pretty clipped off. But poison ivy in the winter when they can access these shrubby tips is extremely attractive. Also just makes a good little thicket where rabbits and small birds and stuff can get in there. But deer actually really like to eat the vegetation. They like those leaves right when, you know, late summer, early fall time frame. I've seen some really big bucks before come into little patches of specifically poison ivy. So it's a bit of a sleeper, but as long as you stay out of it, if you don't get it, let the deer eat it up. All right, this is probably one of my all-time favorites. Not only do deer love it, but when you see it growing in certain environments, it's signaling you that there's early successional habitat available and there's sunlight getting to the ground. This right here is blackberry. It's in the rubus family. A little tip on blackberry, it's got thorns. A lot of times people mix this up with the invasive non-native multiflora rose. Blackberry generally is going have a straighter thorn. You can see this right here. And another huge call out with blackberry is it's going to leaf out. So it's just now starting to push leaves. It's invasive cousin multiflora rose. It's going to already have leaves out. It's had leaves out for weeks. So that very first green up that you see is probably the invasive one. This is native. This produces a soft mass berry. But again, deer actually will nibble on these tips and it stays green really late into the fall. I've seen deer using it into December before just eating the foliage and the vegetation. It stays green. At a time on the landscape when frost is starting to make a lot of vegetation go dormant, it persists a little bit longer. So it's good for that later hunting season time frame. All right, this is a super awesome shrub right here that has so many benefits for people and wildlife. This is elderberry. So you've maybe seen this in teas or medicinal compounds that people make. But these woody tips here like that are super preferred by deer. Again, all these different native plants at different times of year, they're pulling different nutrients. So that's even in these stems, but that's also in the leaves, the vegetation, the flowers. So native plants are really unique in that way. They offer different things at different times of year. In the summer, they're going to flower and there'll be so many insects on this. Turkeys a lot of times, you'll see hens bring small poults. They'll be hanging out underneath these things because there's so many insects on them. They're just falling off like drunk on pollen or whatever. They'll just hang out underneath them and eat bugs. But really good one for the deer, for the woody browse component. There is a barrier there as well. All right, this is another warm season grass here. This is a native prairie grass. This is called Indian grass. You can see these really cool seed heads that are on there. This is probably only about a two-year-old plant. This thing's already seven feet tall. It gets really tall and really thick. But you can see kind of behind me, there's a cool clump of them here. So this is going to continue to develop. I'd say it's going to quadruple in size by the time it fully establishes. In another year or two, this is going to be a super dense grass patch that offers really good visual screening and cover for any type of wildlife that wants to hide, but specifically deer that maybe want to bed back here behind. This right here, it's hard to identify for a lot of people, but this is an oak. This is specifically a pin oak. If you check this out, look here really closely at these buds. It's almost like a little crown. That's how you can identify an oak sapling. Oaks are having a really hard time regenerating on the landscape in the Midwest, and they need a lot of sunlight, and they don't do well competing with a whole bunch of invasive species. And yeah, just that combination is making it really tough for them, but it's important that we manage for them. Not only are the oaks awesome because they produce the acorns that anyone who deer hunts or loves watching deer has probably seen deer eating, but these buds like this are super energy rich for deer, and they're premium woody browse in the wintertime. Deer will travel sometimes for a long ways to feed on patches of oak saplings, and they're in there crushing those buds and eating those branch tips. All right, standing next to a much larger oak. This is a fully mature pin oak. You can see a pretty impressive crown. This thing makes it rain in the fall. Pin oaks drop in here so heavy, and the deer absolutely go bonkers. Got to have oaks for acorns. You got to have little oaks for woody browse. Got to have oaks. All right, this is one of my favorite native grasses. This is another warm season grass. This is called broom sedge. This whole area right here used to be a lawn. All I did was kill the lawn, killed it really well to make sure none of that lawn grass would time, and this was a pretty dry spot, and this native grass just blew up from the seed bank, and it offers super good cover. I get deer all the time kind of moving through here. Again, there's none of the non-native grass that's underneath and around this, so there's actually a lot of different little tunnels and paths down in here. Really good for like a fawn to hide or just deer to bed down in. You always want to have a mixture of woody plants, forbs, all mixed into your grassy areas, but this broom sedge is an absolute workhorse. It's probably one of our most prolific native grasses here in Ohio today. The seed is very fluffy, and it spreads by the wind, so that gives it a major advantage to being able to spread about on the landscape and continue to do well, but awesome native grass for all types of wildlife, and deer specifically love hiding in it. Hope you guys enjoyed that short walkabout checking out some of the native plants that deer love to eat here in our area. I'm in central Ohio, so it might be a little bit different where you are. Let me know in the comments if there's certain plants you see deer eating on where you're from. Make sure to leave this video a like if you found this helpful. We'll see you guys on another video here soon.