Deer picked white oak acorns first in Georgia trials, so start there

STEP 1 · Bench rule

Sound white oak nuts come before the red oak backup

Do the check on foot in October. Pick one white oak group crown and one red oak group crown you can separate. Clear leaves under the white oak group tree as far as the drip line. Whole nuts with no root are the food to hunt while they last. A root tip means fall germination has started in that nut. Bare caps and shells mean the nuts are already gone. Then clear the leaves under the red oak group crown. Solid nuts there are the backup supply. In the Wesner thesis, captive does in Athens consumed red oak group nuts and chose fewer of those nuts while white oak nuts remained in the offering.

A University of Missouri Extension guide written by Pierce and colleagues describes two bearing habits. When one white oak group tree produces well, the other acorn-producing white oaks in that population tend to produce well too. Red oak group trees bear on separate schedules. They can still provide a crop in a year when a late spring freeze might have destroyed the white oak crop. Our read is that one barren white oak warns you about the other white oaks sharing that bench. One barren red oak tells you only about that crown.

STEP 2 · Choice trial

Captive Athens does scored white oak above northern red oak

Wesner ran cafeteria trials on captive adult female white-tailed deer at the Whitehall Deer Research Facility in Athens, Georgia. The document is a 2021 master's thesis at the University of Georgia. The thesis pages we could get never state how many does stood in the trials. White oak, chestnut oak, water oak, and northern red oak made up the mountain and piedmont offering. The preference index runs from 0 for a nut that was avoided to 1 for a nut that was preferred. The means were 0.41 for white oak, 0.31 for chestnut oak, 0.15 for water oak, and 0.09 for northern red oak. The thesis records that four-nut order.

Those means are the order the penned does chose with all four nuts available together.

White oak and northern red oak were both in the mountain offering. The thesis reports a match of preference ranks for the four-nut mountain offering against tannin values drawn from earlier papers. The rank correlation was negative 0.79 and the P value was 0.01. That mountain correlation is in the Wesner thesis.

STEP 3 · Camera record

Swamp chestnut visits rose only on a marginal term

Demeny and colleagues counted acorns under 205 oaks at Four Oaks Plantation in Brooks and Thomas counties, Georgia, during fall 2021 and fall 2022. Cameras watched 30 trees. Swamp chestnut oak stood in for the white oak group. Water oak and laurel oak stood in for the red oak group. Visitation at swamp chestnut oak tended to climb by about 3 percent with every additional acorn, compared with water oak. The authors called that term marginal at P < 0.1. Their paper reports the marginal visit term.

The main test found no measured variable that predicted visitation. The highest mean proportion of deer feeding observations was 0.14 at swamp chestnut oak and the standard error was 0.02. Oak species did not significantly predict deer feeding. Their paper reports that feeding proportion.

Feeders were placed 67 to 373 meters from the camera trees, roughly 220 to 1224 feet. Read the footage as a south Georgia tendency next to supplemental feed.

STEP 4 · Peak week

Swamp chestnut drop moved two months between years

An early October date will miss trees on this property. In 2021 the peaks for water oak, laurel oak, and swamp chestnut oak all landed in November's fourth week. In 2022 the water oak peak and the laurel oak peak landed in November's second week. The swamp chestnut oak peak landed in September's last week. Those peak weeks are reported in the Demeny paper.

Swamp chestnut oak mean crop was 17.2 acorns per tree for 2021 and 2.79 acorns per tree for 2022. The authors called 2022 an apparent mast failure for swamp chestnut oak. Water oak mean crop was 87.2 acorns per tree and later 195 acorns per tree. Traps were active for 10 weeks in 2021 and 16 weeks in 2022, so the water oak change is not the same trapping effort. On this south Georgia bottomland property the swamp chestnut peak shifted by two months across the two falls.

STEP 5 · Tannin range

Compiled white oak values sit under northern red oak

The 1991 U.S. Forest Service review by Tirmenstein puts white oak acorn tannin from 0.5 to 2.5 percent. The same review cites Lewis at 2.94 percent tannin and 4.6 percent lipid. The white oak Fire Effects account gives those percentages.

Smith and Follmer are cited on the northern red oak account at 6 percent tannin. Other work cited there runs from 4.34 to 15.90 percent. The northern red oak Fire Effects account gives those percentages.

Every white oak tannin figure in the two accounts is lower than every northern red oak figure. Lewis at 2.94 percent is the high white oak value. The low northern red oak value is 4.34 percent. Tirmenstein was compiling older studies. No assay in those accounts measured the two species as a pair. The gap is a direction across studies.

STEP 6 · Fall root

White oak germinates after drop and northern red oak waits for spring

The Forest Service white oak review says dormancy is absent in these acorns. Germination starts shortly after the nuts fall. The white oak account states the fall germination. Northern red oak acorns generally wait for spring. Germination follows once winter has ended dormancy. The red oak account states the spring germination. By October a white oak acorn may already have sent a root. A northern red oak acorn beside it can still be a hard seed.

Deer still eat sprouted acorns, according to the white oak review. Once the root starts, that nut is on a fall clock because animals and germination remove it together. Red oak group nuts can stay intact later in the season. That fits the higher tannin readings and the lower place of northern red oak in the Athens trial.

The Missouri guide gives red oak group acorns two growing seasons to mature. The span is 15 months. They are bitter because tannic acid is high. White oak acorns are less bitter. They mature in one growing season. The span is three months. The same guide compares bitterness and ripening time.

Swamp chestnut oak is treated as a white oak group species by that guide. Water oak is treated as a red oak group species there. Northern red oak is grouped with water oak. Both Georgia studies used that sorting. White oak and chestnut oak held the two highest Athens means, and both belong to the white oak group.

Most oak species in the guide make a good crop in just one year out of every three or four. For large healthy white oaks, only about 30 percent made any acorns during a good year. Some trees in the red oak group yield well during a year when other red oaks on the same ground do not. The guide reports the crop timing and that split.

The Missouri Department of Conservation oak mast survey for 2013 shows a wide split and then a near match. White oak index in 2012 stood at 42. Red oak index in 2012 stood at 78. White oak index in 2013 stood at 151. Red oak index in 2013 stood at 150. The survey report prints the two pairs. Our paper on acorn years and forest-county harvest follows registered harvest in the years the agency described the crop. Those index scores average crowns across Missouri and stay silent on the tree above your stand.

STEP 7 · August score

Branch counts and diameter pick candidate crowns

Score the crowns before they drop. Use binoculars during the middle of August and the late part of August while the nuts are still on the twigs. That is the Extension window.

The white oak scale in the guide ranks an average branch excellent when it holds 18 or more acorns. A branch with 12 to 17 acorns ranks good. The red oak scale ranks a branch excellent once it holds 24 or more acorns. The guide took those cuts from earlier Forest Service research. Its graph follows southern Appalachian trees across seven years. Northern red oak output on the graph is highest around a 20 inch diameter taken at 4.5 feet. White oak output is highest around a 26 inch diameter.

The Missouri Department of Conservation habitat page calls acorns the primary deer food in fall and winter when they are plentiful. It recommends about 20 oaks per acre that are producing acorns. Those trees should average a breast-height diameter of at least 14 inches. Use several species from both oak groups. The habitat page states that supply target.

The Extension guide wants the oak share of the woods at about 50 to 60 percent, with the two groups split. For each white oak group stem a second mix allows two or three stems from the red oak group. Either arrangement leaves mast when one group loses its flowers.

Our paper on picking the tree rather than the ridge shows a coarse leaf-off picture merging crowns that stand side by side. The picture can locate the bench. Your boots have to choose the crown. Get this year's mast report and the season dates from your state wildlife agency.