What's your favorite food? I love pizza, but I also like a wide
variety of things. Everything from favorites like meatloaf,
turkey with all the trimmings, or steak on the grill, to Italian
and even Chinese every now and then.

Deer enjoy a variety of foods also. In most areas they will take
advantage of whatever is ripe and ready. Some favorites are:

• Pasture grasses
• Agricultural crops like apples, oats, corn and soybeans
• Mast crops like acorns, beechnuts and hickory nuts
• Tasty twigs from maple, apple and greenbriar

An area that offers a good mix of these types of food sources
will likely be good deer habitat. This means areas that have
agricultural crops broken up by hardwood lots with streams
zigzagging through them.

The key for you as a hunter is to know the preferred food sources
available in your hunting area. This changes from one year to the
next as farmers may plant different crops, and some years there
may be a bumper crop of acorns followed by a year with none.

You also need to know when the deer will hitting specific foods.
A good example are brassicas. Deer won't pay much attention to
them until the first frost hits. After that they'll immediately
mow them off because the plants convert their starches to sugar
and they become deer candy!

So look for places that provide the variety that deer like and
you just might spice up your hunting season.