I have been working on landscaping my front yard and mostly finished a few weeks ago. In the mornings I would see 1-4 plants lying on the grass a few feet from where they were originally planted. This would randomly occur. I was blaming all the wrong culprits. I first though it was a goose from our lake but they don’t usually come near my house. My best clue came a few mornings ago when I saw the tops of a couple of plants that were bitten off instead of pulled up. This morning I peaked out and saw this trail and it went straight to my new planting and sure enough two were bitten off and 2 were pulled. I’m old enough for it to not take so long to figure out who the varmint was.
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That trail looks to me to be from a fawn, not a full-grown deer. Is that your assessment as well?
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My guess is that it’s a rabbit. The tracks look like a small animal, and deer tend to tear foliage, not make clean cuts. Rabbits also like to uproot new plants.
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I haven’t actually seen it in my new plants. I also think that it is a young deer.
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Early on I was also thinking it was a rabbit. I haven’t actually seen it so it is possible.
I was thinking that looked deer related too. A bit too wide and two-tracked for a suburban rabbit, no?
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In my experience rabbits generally just chew things off of plants whereas deer are more apt to pull newly planted specimens out of the ground while munching on them. As a rabbit hops I would expect the area of disturbed dew to have outside edges which more resemble a pair of sinusoidal waves, 180 degrees out of phase with each other. The more narrow but largely variable width of the track pointed me towards a fawn instead of an adult deer.
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What you are saying makes sense, @Audi_o_phile.
One thing that would still point to “rabbit” to me would be if the tops of the victimized plants were cleanly snipped. Deer have to rip their forage off the plant. @Auburn, were the tops that were “bitten off” sheared off cleanly (as if done by incisors) or did they look like they were torn off?
I admit that I am not good at reading tracks – maybe someone like @TNHunter will weigh in. Anyway, I am sort of invested now in finding out what critter it was.
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I was thinking that the two trails were not one track of a bigger animal (with the chest elevated) but two separate trails: the ingress and egress paths of a smaller animal like a bunny. Although I guess it maybe could have been a bigger animal (like a small deer) that took exactly the same path into and back out from @Auburn’s salad bar.
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I see deer tracks regular in my garden… they show up well in the soft dirt.
But I rarely see deer tracks or trails in the grass. It can be near impossible to track a deer across an established and mowed lawn… unless the ground is really soft… just came a good rain.
You may have to invest in a nice trail camera to figure out what made those trails in the grass. I would be suprised if that was done by deer.
Skunk, armadillo, possibly rabbit… something short that would scrub across the grass like that.
Good Luck !
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Pictures this morning from bites about 1 week ago. Some new growth has occurred but you can still see the bite marks.
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The roots are starting to get established so these lucky plants will easily grow back.
Deer for sure.
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Agreed. That damage looks like deer to me as well.
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Apparently deer don’t like the taste of Lantana but they bite on everything around it.
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