Ha ha ha, NO. At least the deer around here won't eat any bamboo. Of course they will eat anything and almost everything ELSE around here, but they won't bother bamboo. Deer are considered pests where we are at. They destroy anything they can get their mouths on. The things that will eat bamboo are cows, sheep and goats.

If you kept your grove open enough (didn't keep it as a dense thicket), deer would go in there I imagine. If you want to actually attract deer (though I can't imagine why anyone except hunters would want to, especially being an avid gardener), you also may want to plant apple and oak trees. They absolutely LOVE apples. They even came up on our front porch and were eating a bucket of wild apples we had gathered.

I've never had the deer touch any of my bamboo. Even if they did, it wouldn't be an effective method to control running bamboo.

The consensus is that deer do not favor bamboo but a hungry deer will eat anything. Young, newly emerging shoots seem to be the preferred stage, not the mature culms.

And I agree, not an effective method of control. Both deer and escaped bamboo abound in my area and both seem to compete against each other equally well for world dominance.

Deer in general avoid any ornamental grasses and bamboo is just a very big ornamental grass :-))

I've never had deer go after my bamboo shoots, but I can see how that could be an issue. Where I previously lived, there were no deer, but the squirrels were really destructive to the shoots. Where I live now, there are lots of deer and squirrels, but they seem to ignore the bamboo shoots...and destroy other things :-(

Odd that they seem to avoid even the shoots as humans seem to love the cooked ones. I still think they seem to be attacked to the cover of the grove (especially in Winter)..., even if they don't eat anything.

Related question: Does a bamboo grove provide a known habitat for other animals (e.g., birds?).

We have no pandas..., ;)

The one animal that can significantly decimate a bamboo grove is a herd of elephants. They do a good job eating everything from the bamboo. I have seen wild elephant herds leveling bamboo groves in South India. LOL.

Thank God they haven't gotten to my neighborhood yet ;-)

Wild hogs will completely destroy a bamboo grove. There is some Fishpole bamboo covering about 2 acres that was planted back 30 years ago, along the river here. Hogs tore it up completely on the roadside, and in the pasture where it grew out from, there is little left standing, and this was done all in just 2 or 3 nights. Culms were 25 to 30 feet tall. When wild hogs want something, there is little to stop them from getting to it. I just wonder if it was worth the effort to dig up the bamboo to get to their food. The bamboo will grow back, but the damage was extensive. I think I'd rather deal with elephants.

I only have to worry about earthquakes....

Earthquakes? Well, in that case, I'll take the hogs.

Ok...you can have my hogs and I'll try to keep the earthquakes here... ;-)

It's a deal!

LOL