Oak trees provide a whitetail buffet, and a hunting hotspot

In early fall, when archery season starts, whitetail bucks undergo noticeable dramatic physical, hormonal and behavioral changes.

These changes are obvious as bucks shed velvet, revealing white antlers. At the same time, hair color shifts from thin reddish-brown, to thick and brownish-gray. And they also "bulk up" for the soon-to-be-upon-them breeding season followed by a challenging winter.

Whitetails need to eat like never before.

So subsequently, that summertime spooky, reclusive, pencil-necked homebody of a critter in velvet morphs quickly into a bull-necked, ornery, feisty, and, once in a while, foolish animal … all in just two months.

And whitetails become eating machines.

Eating machines on the front side are also waste machines on the back end.

As whitetails eat acorns, they often are messy, letting the acorn cap fall, along with some of the meat of the nut and saliva. Fresh acorn caps, still green on the inside, and pieces of chewed acorns are a dead giveaway to the usage of a particular oak tree as a prime feeding site.

Scouting hunters should have no trouble finding these preferred mast sites by reading this sign. Then work stand-placement-hunting tactics around this obvious forensic evidence on the ground.

Deer tell us which trees they prefer.

Bow hunters need to remember though, that when hunting whitetails, nothing stays the same.

This week's hotspot may be next week's memory, especially once the acorns are gone and the rut kicks in.

A hotspot always seems best, just as it’s over.

A good pair of binoculars lets a hunter access the amount of acorns yet to fall. Some trees produce a lot of acorns early, and then seem to dry up. Others drop acorns before and right through the bow season. And yet, other trees take the year off, in fact are resting.

While this wild buffet attracts whitetails for feed, the accumulating scent left behind by deer utilizing these smorgasbords exponentially increases the whitetail traffic there. Here in the oaks, deer create socialization and rutting staging areas. Scrapes and rubs pop up overnight.

When both white and red oaks drop nuts, deer forsake cornfields and food plots to dine on acorns.

Then hunters echo a common refrain, saying, "I'm not seeing the deer in the fields at dusk I was seeing in late summer."

Trust me. The deer are in the oaks when the acorns fall.

Whitetail rut prediction for 2022:What to expect while hunting this fall

White oaks and Red oaks are different species and it has been said that white oak acorns are preferred.

My experience is that whitetails gobble up every acorn, and are not discriminating as to color.

But anyone who has tasted a red acorn knows they are quite bitter, due to the tannic acid. Yet, a wonderful tasting bread is made from acorns, after soaking and straining the tannins out.

White oak acorns can be eaten raw, and I have munched them on occasion to prove the point. But they are a bit bitter. Oak trees vary, too. One white oak will have milder tasting acorns than another.

Though acorns contain a low percentage of protein, especially red oak acorns, they are incredibly high in fat content, up to 15 percent, according to researchers.

The nuts from the oak trees are also easy to digest, allowing for massive consumption. Needless to say, when there is a bumper mast crop, whitetails will bulk up and weigh more than in any other year. Poor mast production always follows a bumper crop, as each year oak trees produce different amounts of nuts.

There have been many formulas for predicting a bumper crop of acorns, but even the scientists who study such things have not been able to figure out a fail-proof system for determining the future acorn fall.

One of the enjoyable and exciting aspects of hunting in oaks with a good mast crop is that whitetails will often come in at any time, not just dawn and dusk.

But one of the drawbacks is that deer will often move their bedroom into the dining room so it makes our approach to the stand without spooking deer more problematic.

A good tactic to avoid detection is to place a stand on a pinch-point, or travel corridor keying on the trails to and from the whitetail buffet, instead of placing a stand in the middle of the oaks, right next to the kitchen table.

Oak Duke writes a weekly column appearing on the Outdoors page of The Spectator.

This article originally appeared on The Evening Tribune: Oak trees provide a whitetail buffet, and a hunting hotspot