When Do Deer Eat Arborvitae? (And How to Stop It)
If you've ever walked out in February to find your arborvitae stripped bare from the ground to four feet up, you already know what deer season looks like. For homeowners across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, it's one of the most frustrating — and expensive — parts of owning mature landscaping.
Here's why it happens, when the risk is highest, and what actually works to stop it.
Why Deer Target Arborvitae
Deer are opportunists. They eat what's available, accessible, and palatable — and arborvitae check all three boxes, especially in winter.
Most deciduous plants drop their leaves by November, leaving deer with a sharply reduced menu. Arborvitae stay green, full, and fragrant all year. Their soft evergreen foliage is highly digestible and nutritious compared to bark, dried grass, or dormant shrubs. From a deer's perspective, an unprotected arborvitae in January is the equivalent of a salad bar in the middle of a food desert.
Arborvitae are also typically planted at property edges and in rows — exactly the kind of accessible, low-effort foraging that deer prefer. They don't want to work hard for a meal. If your trees are easy to reach, they'll keep coming back.
When the Damage Is Worst
Deer feed year-round, but arborvitae damage is most severe from late October through early April — the period when:
- Natural food sources (grass, agricultural crops, soft vegetation) are gone or buried under snow
- Deer have depleted their fat reserves and feeding pressure intensifies
- Snow cover raises the effective browse height, allowing deer to reach higher into trees than they can in summer
- Breeding season (rut) has passed and deer are focused almost entirely on caloric intake
The single most dangerous window for arborvitae is after the first significant snowfall. Once snow is on the ground, deer shift heavily to evergreens. Many homeowners lose significant foliage in a single night.
Why Arborvitae Rarely Recover from Deer Damage
Unlike many deciduous shrubs that rebound from browsing, arborvitae don't regenerate from bare wood. Once deer strip the foliage from a branch, that branch is gone permanently. If the lower third of a tree is stripped, it will remain brown and bare — the tree itself may survive, but the visual damage is irreversible.
A mature arborvitae that took 8–10 years to reach its current size can be permanently disfigured in a single winter. Replacing it costs hundreds of dollars and another decade of growth.
What Doesn't Work (Reliably)
Deer repellent sprays — work inconsistently. Effectiveness drops sharply after rain or snow, and most need to be reapplied every 2–4 weeks through the winter. The cost and labor add up, and in heavy snow years, it's nearly impossible to keep up with the reapplication schedule when your trees actually need protection most.
Motion-activated devices — deer habituate to them quickly. A device that startles deer on day one is often ignored by week two.
Chicken wire or fencing — effective but unsightly and labor-intensive. Staking a perimeter fence around each tree takes significant time, leaves your yard looking like a construction site, and needs to come down each spring.
What Actually Works
A physical barrier that deer can't bite through is the only truly reliable protection. Deer-Terrent's netting wrap was designed specifically for this situation — lightweight polypropylene netting that wraps directly around the arborvitae, conforms to its natural shape, and is virtually invisible from the street.
Deer encounter the netting, can't get to the foliage, and move on. No spray to reapply, no fence to stake, no structure to build.
Install it in October before the ground freezes and deer pressure builds. Remove it in April. Fold it away and reuse it next season.
Each wrap covers one arborvitae up to 10' tall and 5' in diameter. For rows of arborvitae, the 60" × 330' landscaper roll covers 120–150 linear feet.
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