Animals Browsing Winter Plants

by Kevin Strauss

With the thaw and freeze that we've just had in the northland, most winter animals can now walk on top of the snow without leaving any tracks. But that doesn't mean that there aren't ways to tell when wildlife is around. One easy way to watch for animals is to look for "browse marks" or chew marks on trees and bushes. These marks tell us that there are white-tailed deer, snowshoe hare and sometimes even moose in the neighborhood.

Snowshoe hare signs

Snowshoe hares change their diet with the approaching winter from their summer leaf and seed diet to a winter bark diet. Hares feed on the bark of quaking aspens and red osier dogwood and generally eat the bark from saplings or eat the bark from twigs after beavers fell a larger tree. The thicker bark of older trees is probably either too thick for hares, or isn't nutritious enough to make feeding on it worthwhile.

Hares use their four incisors (front teeth) to nip off tree buds at a neat 45-degree angle. The resulting branches look like they had been snipped by a pair of scissors.
In the spring, hikers are often surprised when they see what appears to be snowshoe hare teeth marks three feet up a sapling. Of course we often forget that when the hare made those chew marks, there was three feet of snow on the ground. While snowshoe hares sometimes girdle and kill the saplings and shrubs that they eat, most plants have defenses that protect their roots so they can sprout new saplings each spring.

When you see what might be snowshoe hare browse marks, look around for scat (droppings) as well. Snowshoe hare scat looks like small round balls of sawdust, because that is what it is.

White-tailed deer signs

Unlike snowshoe hares, deer don't have any front top teeth. That means that they can't "snip off" buds like hares do. Instead deer tear off buds, leaving the branch tips with a rough, torn appearance.

During the winter, deer also change their diet from leaves, twigs and grasses to almost exclusively twigs, buds and bark. While they eat 6-8 pounds plant material in the summer, they eat less in the winter, simply because finding that much browse is difficult in the snow. During winter deer live partially off their stored fat from the summer and can loose up to 25 percent of their (150-250 pound) body weight and still survive. This time of year, deer scat varies from light brown to dark brown with raisin-like pellets.

Moose signs

In a lot of ways, an 800-1,000 pound moose acts like a "giant deer," so moose browse sign looks like deer sign, only bigger. When moose are browsing in winter, they feed on broadleaf plants like aspen and birch as well as needle-leaf trees like white cedars, consuming both twigs and bark. Look for large teeth marks high up (5'-6') on trees. When you are in a moose browse area, you know it. Moose consume up to 60 pounds plant material every day in the summer and like deer, eat a smaller diet of twigs and bark, so they spend much of their day either browsing or "chewing their cud" in a sheltered area. Just like cows, deer and moose have four stomachs and re-chew their food several times to get all of the nutrition they can out of it.

Moose scat is almost "tater-tot" sized and varies from light brown to dark brown in color. If you pick it apart with a stick, it consists mostly of wood fiber.

Some animals are hard to find in the woods, but they often leave their signs, like browse, scat, and when we get more snow, tracks, behind for a careful observer to see.

The next time you are out for a walk, look for brows signs, even in town. You'd be surprised how much even city trees fall prey to our plant-eating neighbors.

The Ely Timberjay