Yes, that looks like deer browse. Deer don’t bite as much as they grab and tear, so it’s very common for branches to be damaged, even ripped off.
As noted, deer laugh at a 5’ fence. The Community Garden nearby used to have a 6’ fence, but the deer would line up every evening to jump it. After suffering severe damage, I put up a 7.5’ fence, which has worked well so far.
Supposedly deer dislike jumping into small spaces, so a double fence maybe 2-3 apart can work well even if the height is lower. They also dislike jumping into areas that they can’t see so maybe a layer of landscape fabric at eye level would help.
Some deer. Wildlife vary a great deal in their behavior and a lot depends of food availability but it’s more complicated than that. A 3’ fence was adequate when I first moved here, but now 6’ is required and during drought it pays to run a line of deep sea fishing line just outside the fence at about 4’ height supported by rebar. They freak out when their legs get caught up in super strong fishing line.
Most years, my deer don’t bother eating my fruit and only browse on leaves below about 4’, but with the drought we are having, they are even eating tomatoes. My nearest client about 4 miles from me have deer that routinely get up on their hind legs to brows up to 6.5’ high. This year that’s happening in my orchard for the first time, almost certainly due to drought.
Or a landing spot. Often we can’t control the outside of the fence if it is near the property line but if you deprive them of a place to land they will not risk breaking a leg to munch on a branch.
Heck you can incorporate landing hazards into your orchard. A trellis for vines 2~3 feet from the fence would do it, so would growing bushes next to it. It would be a bit of a pain to maintain and harvest the side towards the fence but this would just be part of the fencing strategy.
Sure. It depends on population pressure and the available of food. With populations expanded after a few mild winters and with the difficulties of drought, deer are eating things that they’ve never touched before, like irises. They stand on hind legs to eat holly!
The key fact is that the capability to jump a 6’ fence is there. So fruit trees and vegetables “protected” by such a low fence are sitting on a ticking time bomb. For example, deer left my apple trees untouched for almost a year. Then they bloomed. Deer ate every bloom they could reach plus associated leaves. The orchard looked like a war zone. It’s way easier just to put up proper fences and relax.
I manage about 100 orchards and if I was proactive on each one, my prices would rise quite a bit. Mostly we live and harvest with deer on the grounds and it usually works fine if you have plenty of fruit up high.
Where 5’ fencing works fine most of the time here is to protect young trees with a cylinder using a 10-12 length of fencing and a single post. I have never lost a growing tree this way and at only one site did deer push in fencing to browse in the last 30 years I’ve been planting and tending orchards for a living. Their were a few trees out of the 120 I planted there that needed 3 stakes, including a Mutsu apple for some reason and the mulberry trees. Oh and a couple of Asian pear trees.
Once the trees were well enough established we removed the fence rings and only protected trunks from rubs. The bucks used to butt the trees to make them drop fruit there. Have never seen that anywhere else either. I was told the previous owner on this 50 acre estate used to feed the deer corn as though they were pets. After a few years the bucks stopped butting the trunks- maybe because there were so many drops or maybe because they lost their taste for corn sugar.
I agree what wildlife targets is regional. My uncle had a apple tree that was full of apples that was totally stripped of apples and any foliage. Like I said above mine are never stripped. My neighborhood has a bunch of apples with some form of apple or crabapple planted in almost each person’s yard so it is likely there is a lot of other options for them though. I also found the smaller the tree the more prone they are. My trees from Raintree, bare root trees from One Green World, trees from Trees Of Antiquity are all big enough from the start I don’t feel the need to protect them too much from deer. My mulberry trees from Whitman farms were heavily browsed on compared to the bigger mulberry tree and left unprotected would be browsed too heavily. My supreme sized apple trees that cost about 60 bucks from Stark bros I feel can be left unprotected but if I buy something not supreme sized from Stark Bros I feel the need to heavily protect it. My first time I bought from Stark Bros I spent over 200 dollars getting yellow donut peaches and they all were chewed to nothing because they were already so small and the trunk was so skinny. I find once the caliper of a trench is a certain size animals will not bother it but under a certain size it becomes a issue.