Have you or a loved one experienced deer damage in your landscape? Living in northern Utah has all kinds of perks, particularly how easy it is to escape the city and head up the canyons for some beautiful mountain views and all sorts of seasonal recreations. However, this close proximity to wild areas means that wildness might also come to you and your landscape … in the form of a hungry deer.
What kinds of deer are native to Utah?
Utah’s only native deer species is the Rocky Mountain mule deer (Odocoileous hemionus). They are a common sight throughout the entire state in a variety of habitats due to their seasonal migration patterns in search of food. They’ve made the Wasatch range home since the end of the last Ice Age – more than 10,000 years – so it’s no surprise that they continue to do what they do, especially if it’s in your backyard. There are also native Elk (Wapiti, Cervus canadensis), Moose (Alces alces) and Pronghorn Antelope (Antilocapra americana) that may roam your neighborhood in search of food in the winter.
What do deer normally eat?
Mule Deer have evolved to eat the native plants in our area. They are ruminant mammals, meaning they have a special stomach and digestive system enabling them to maximize the nutrition of plants found in our environment. Herds of deer typically spend the spring and summer at higher elevations in search of cooler temperatures and abundant herbaceous plant material. Think of leafy green plants and wildflowers, a class of plants called forbs. In winter, however, high elevation nutrition sources are either depleted, dried out, or covered by snow, so mule deer migrate down to lower elevations in search of something to eat. Instead of leafy greens, they have to make do with feeding – or browsing – on twigs, small branches, evergreen foliage, and even bark throughout the late fall and winter.
Why do deer eat landscape plants?
Human-planted landscapes provide unique and irresistible alternatives to the meager offerings deer are limited to in the fall and winter. Deer particularly love to eat plants with broad leaves, flowers and fruits, especially when they are pumped full of nitrogen-rich fertilizers.
Landscape Plants Deer Love to Eat:
- Fruit Trees
- Berries and Small Fruits
- Flowering Trees with Persistent Fruit: Chokecherry, Crabapple, Hawthorn
- Broadleaf Evergreens: Euonymus, English Ivy, Laurel, Photinia
- Hostas
- Daylillies
- Roses – They don’t mind even the thorniest branches to get at Rose flowers and hips
- Hydrangeas
- Pansies
- Tulips
- Certain Pines: especially Austrian, Bosnian, Mugo, Scots
Avoiding these plants and utilizing alternatives is a good way to prevent deer damage in the first place.
What kind of damage can deer do?
Even if you don’t see the culprits in person, the calling cards of deer damage are distinctive.
Grazing/Browsing Damage
Mule deer lack an upper row of teeth, only a hard pallet against which their lower incisors can work like a knife and a cutting board. Instead of foliage being neatly clipped off, leaves are raggedly torn free and twigs and branches are stripped away. They also have wide, soft tongues and long, pliable lips which enables them to maneuver around branches and thorns. Deer are notorious for stripping plants to the ground past the point of recovery, but they may also simply graze plants. Grazing usually leaves most of a plant intact, so it can then recover from any cosmetic damage. Put these all together and you get the distinctively ragged damage characteristic of mule deer browsing.
Trunk Damage
Another major concern when it comes to deer damage is trunk rubbing. During the mule deer mating season, also called rutting, male deer or bucks will rub their antlers on small trees. They do this to mark their territory and communicate with other bucks and does, and also to rub the velvety tissue off of their newly formed antler growth. This rubbing often causes fatal damage in trees from the size of sapling all the way up to telephone pole sized trunks. This typically occurs during the rutting season, which may begin as early as October and can last into January, depending on a population’s health and location.
How to protect your landscape from deer damage
What can you do to encourage deer to stay out of your landscape? One method is to physically stop them gaining access, either by setting up physical barriers or by introducing a stimulus that scares them away.
Physical barriers
Including stone or cinderblock walls and various sorts of fencing (stockade, plastic mesh, wire mesh or chain link). Whatever your choice, these need to be at least 8 feet tall and continue down to the soil line because mule deer can jump up at least that high and will dig underneath if their hunger is strong enough.
Negative stimulus
Including installing motion-activated light or noise sources, sprinklers attached to motion sensors, and the introduction of strong scents that mule deer find repellant (including rotten eggs, predator urine, Irish Spring soap, garlic bulbs, and bloodmeal). However, while there is much evidence suggesting these methods can be initially successful, their efficacy can wane over time as hunger motivates mule deer to take more and more risks in search of food.
Plant protection
Including wrapping sensitive evergreens and shrubs with burlap from fall through spring. Protecting the trunks of young to medium size trees from rubbing is also recommended, either by wrapping them with plastic or mesh trunk guards (these are removed during the active growing season) or by installing a metal barrier that prevents mule deer from reaching them with their mouths or their antlers (especially critical during rutting season).
Building Deer Resistance in the Landscape
If your efforts to prevent deer access to your yard haven’t paid off, you might want to think about deer resistance by way of plant selection and intelligent design. But before you do that, you need to unpack the idea of deer resistance as a concept.
First off, deer “resistance” does not mean deer “proof” – a hungry deer will always surprise you! Secondly, “resistance” can be understood in one of two ways:
(1) Resistant as in deer will tend not to browse a certain plant but might do so as a last resort
(2) Resistant as in deer may browse them but the plants are resistant to catastrophic damage resulting in death and in fact recover nicely. Defined in these ways, you might start to look at your landscape’s relationship to deer as not only resistant but approaching some degree of co-existence where deer visits are anticipated and managed.
Preventing Deer Damage with Plant Selections
First of all, a word of caution regarding deer resistant plant lists. While some lists are based on actual deer management science, most are compiled anecdotally and so come from someone’s personal experience with deer in a landscape. A lot of these recommendations are based on real success (or heartache!) with a certain plant, but always remember that deer may eat a certain plant in one area only to leave it alone in another; moreover, deer tastes vary by individual, by herd, by region, by season, and by the availability (or lack) of more appealing options. In other words, mule deer are full of surprises, so you might also find that many lists can be surprisingly contradictory.
Link: Deer Resistant Plants for Northern Utah
Resisting vs. Co-Existing with Deer Damage
For many of us, deer are a common element of life in northern Utah and predictable presences in our landscapes. At the same time, investing in creating beautiful outdoor spaces is an important way we make this unique area truly our home. So often, these two realities intersect, whether we like it or not, so understanding the motivations behind why mule deer visit our yards can assist us in coping with them.
