Browse identification

[mnlineman]

Can someone tell me what this plant is. It grows along the river here they seem to like the flower but not the rest of the plant. Found 2 bucks bedding in ferns surrounded by this stuff.

[elk yinzer]

Looks like wood nettle and ostrich fern. I've never seen deer browse heavily on nettles, I don't think it is preferred.

[JakeB]

What part of the country are you in?

[JakeB]

Looks like elk nailed it

[ghoasthunter]

yea its a type of nettle for sure deer eat it quite often in marshes around me they also eat jewel weed that grows in same locations they are not going too fill there stomach on it but they will take nibbles at it all day both plants are actually edible the nettle needs preparing but the jewel weed counteracts the sting from the nettle. so you can even use jewel weed to remove the itch on your skin. i always wondered if deer use it the same way but in there stomach.

[hambone]

Stinging nettle. We call it itchweed. Jewel weed stops the itching and burn of nettle stings when rubbed into your skin. The two plants grow in close proximity to each other.

[Razorhead]

Another common name for it in our area is burn hazel. If you enlarge the first photo you can actually see the very fine hairlike thorns that cover the stems and leaf petioles. These small thorns are what cause the toxic reaction when you come into contact with the plant. It is a fairly short lived reaction but a very uncomfortable one none the less. I have also seen deer eat it but certainly wouldn’t consider it to be a preferred species for deer browse from my experience with it.

[mnlineman]

Looks like wood nettle and ostrich fern. I've never seen deer browse heavily on nettles, I don't think it is preferred.

Thank you. This was about a 5 acre patch and almost all of what I walked through had the tops bitten off. Good thing I didn't try to take a nap in it.

[mnlineman]

What part of the country are you in?

Minnesota

[brancher147]

Stinging nettle. Deer in the mountains browse it heavily here in the summer.

[Jdw]

I see a lot of browse sign on Jewel weed.

I did not know what the plant was called until I looked it up, after it was mentioned in this thread.

[elk yinzer]

[url]https://www.qdma.com/know-native-deer-foods/
[/url]

This is a good article that reviews some of the highly preferred browse species. All hunters and especially big woods hunters should know a great deal of these plants. When you get to scouting new areas, seeing browsing impacts on preferred species is probably the best indicator of the deer densities you are looking at.

I would say in my experience in my area the most preferred are greenbriar, pokeweed, and blackberry/raspberry. That is excluding a lot of the forbs and ephemerals though, they are a lot less noticeable because when the deer them, they just gone. There are no trees on that list which have a lot of variability too.

[CattailCommander]

There's a free app that you can download for your phone called "Pl@ntNet". I use it and its pretty accurate. All you do is take a picture of part of the plant, either with the app or you can use your phones camera and save the picture and identify it through the app later. After you select the picture in the app, you select what part you are identifying from the picture (leaf, fruit, flower, or stem) and after that it will bring up results with similar characteristics of the plant, which I've found to be very accurate so far. Really simple to use and I've had fun just identifying different plants I see all the time but never knew what they were. Just another tool in the toolbox.