Mountain Maple

3I0

A good 3 year old buck
Does anyone have any experience working with mountain maple (acer spicatum) for deer? Tried searching the forum and not a lot of info out there on them. I read an interesting paper titled "Winter foraging strategy of white-tailed deer at the northern limit of its range" (title definitely describes my property) and saw they determined the largest portion of the deers diet in the studied area was mountain maple (between 39% and 44.6% of their winter diet over the 3 study years).

My place has a lot of this stuff, seems to grow in shadier areas and is one of the only sources of browse in more mature stands of trees... however some of it has definitely grown out of deer reach. The stems lower to the ground appear heavily browsed though.

I've been working on quite a bit of clear cutting my land this winter (mostly 20 year old aspen regrowth), and so far have just been whacking this stuff down too in the hopes it'll explode with growth again like aspen.

Besides just cutting these down to hopefully reset them, have a couple other questions:

- Is it worth hinge cutting taller ones (thumb size, 12-15' high)? I plan to try a couple anyways since I don't have many other hinge-able trees, just to try it out. Wont provide a ton of side cover, but just curious if this will get more food lower to the ground.

- Are they easily grown from cuttings? I'd like to get way more of these established if I can, just curious if its red osier dogwood easy (cut off and stick in ground), or if I will need to look into rooting hormone/etc?
 
I've read on Mountain maple but don't have any. I have some striped maple in our understory which I think may be used similarly. What I'd suggest is that you try caging some of the re-growth to prevent use and see if you can see the difference in growth of caged vs uncaged. I've often though a small plot of apple seedlings that is intermittently caged and available for browse would be a neat idea. Save all the seeds from apples you eat and plant so it could be cheap.

But I'm also somewhat wary of putting effort into too many of these things that are supposed to be highly preferred browse. I planted some Strawberry Bush 5 or 6 years ago and have kept it caged so it could get established. I removed the cage from one grouping last fall and only saw a nibble or two when I looked last weekend even though a couple deer tracks in the snow went right through it. I'll leave that one available and see if they get more interested in it. I have some related Eastern Wahoo that gets consistently nibbled off at the top of the 4 or 5 ft tree tube.
 
I have mountain maple at my place in Ontario. Definitely a favorite browse species for deer. I leave one trunk tall enough to hold leaves out of reach for deer, and I only cut them if I'm there before they leaf out. Never tried to propagate or graft them, but I assume you could stool or trench layer them.
 
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