Everywhere Acorns

Throughout the summer, it's been pretty easy to see a bunch of deer in an evening. You simply drive around the backroads and look for those lush green fields of soy beans.

Well, in the last few weeks seeing the same number of deer has been impossible. Spotting mature bucks? Even tougher. The vast majority of bucks here in Michigan (and throughout the Midwest) are still in velvet and running around in bachelor groups. It's a bit too early for those deer to really break up and start doing the things they do that drive us crazy trying to locate them during the bow season.

I'm not the only that's noticed the sudden lack of whitetails. I'm the host/producer of Midwest Whitetail-Michigan and oversee a prostaff of a couple dozen guys. Almost all of them have commented about the sudden disappearance of deer they'd been watching. I was miffed.

So, I did what every hunter should do -- I went to my office. Okay, so maybe we should all spend a little less time at the office but this is one time when going to work actually helped in the woods. See, we have a big red oak tree near the sidewalk that leads to our entrance. It's a sidewalk that is covered in bits of fresh, green acorns. Aha!

So I went to the woods to confirm my suspicions. The acorns are dropping -- and dropping in a big way. One of the areas I hunt is home to scores of big red oaks and the forest floor is littered with fresh nuts. Well, mystery solved. The deer haven't left. They're simply feasting on the freshly-fallen acorns. I don't have a ton of white oaks in the areas I hunt but I suspect they've not yet started to drop. They tend to run a bit later than do red oaks. And, of course, deer seem to prefer the acorns from white oaks over those of red oaks. But there is no doubt the local whitetails are absolutely pounding the red oak acorns here in Michigan right now.

I don't recall this many acorns dropping this early in the year. But it's happening and it's absolutely going to impact the places I choose to hunt when the archery season opens on Oct. 1. How about you?

Tony Hansen, Michigan