What Are The Wildlife Up To This Summer?

As hunters and wildlife enthusiasts we tend to focus on wildlife behavior and biology during hunting season but tend to forget about them during the summer months.  But the summer months are very important to our population numbers.  Hunting season includes mating season, but now the babies are hitting the ground and the real fun is in full swing.

Whitetail deer are busy growing the new crop of fawns and growing antlers (for the bucks).  Bucks lose their antlers in the spring after rut and grow new ones this time of year.  For the most part, bucks grow bigger antlers each year until they peak around age 5-6.  Several factors enter into antler growth including age, genetics and nutrition.  You can’t change age or genetics easily but you can supply good nutrition as they are growing new antlers right now.  The added nutrition will also help the does that are fawning and nursing those fawns right now.

Wild turkey hens are busy raising their poults alone.  They breed and nest in the spring each year.  It only takes about 28 days of sitting on the nest for the eggs to hatch.  The poults are learning how to eat and groom themselves as well as how to roost and get away from predators.  Poults that have survived to this point have a good chance of making it to adulthood.  They will rejoin the larger population in the fall.

Warm season supplemental nutrition provides food sources when population numbers are at their highest.  Deer are nutritionally stressed due to antler growth and fawn rearing.  Turkey hens are finding places to feed their poults.  This supplemental nutrition can come in the form of grains provided in wildlife feeders or in food plots.  Food plots during the warm season are an underutilized nutrition source.  We can grow many highly nutritious forage crops for wildlife during the summer.  Some great choices include millet (brown top, pearl, dove proso), sunn hemp, clay peas, cowpeas, hairy indigo, perennial peanut, Aeschynomene Americana, alyceclover and more.

Warm Season Food Plots for White tailed deer publication

For more information about warm season wildlife food plots contact your local extension agent.