Feeding deer is something of a time-honored tradition in New Hampshire and Vermont. The hardship of winter moves some well-meaning people to set out food for deer, while more-pragmatic souls believe that feeding deer in winter will increase their chances of bagging a buck the following fall. Either way, many people look forward to the thrill of seeing deer eating at close quarters.
Feeding deer, however, raises important practical issues. For a start, it’s banned in Vermont – yes, it’s against the law – and strongly discouraged by wildlife officials in New Hampshire. Even though commercial deer feed is available, it does not grant an automatic license to use it.
And not without reason. Deer are in no danger of dying out in either state, and in some areas, there is evidence that the deer herd exceeds the carrying capacity of the habitat. Overpopulation interrupts forest regeneration, since deer browse on the buds and twigs of young saplings. Look for strangely stunted trees with dense, twiggy growth, as the trees try to replace browsed-off buds by sending forth new branches, only to be browsed again. Deer are also eradicating many native plants, including ginseng and orchids, by eating them faster than they can regenerate.
Winter feeding of deer can also be detrimental to the deer themselves, the good intentions of the person doing the feeding notwithstanding. Setting out food in the fall can disrupt the migration of deer to wintering areas – or deer yards – which can be up to 20 miles from their summer range. Deer yards, characterized by thick evergreen forest, provide cover from extreme weather, deep snow, and predators.
Once deer become accustomed to a feeding station, they will stay in its vicinity even if the food is indigestible or nutritionally insufficient. They can thus starve to death, because they lose their incentive to travel in search of natural forage. Furthermore, the deer that take most of the food at a feeding station are not the most needy: the strongest, most aggressive animals will monopolize the food, pushing out the weaker, more vulnerable ones.
The types of food people give to deer may also cause malnutrition and associated problems. Deer are able to digest fibrous vegetation thanks to special bacteria that populate the intestinal segment known as the rumen. During the year, a deer’s diet shifts from deciduous, leafy plants in summer to plants eaten out of necessity in winter, such as coniferous twigs. The makeup of the bacteria in the rumen changes slowly to accommodate these shifts. Feeding wintering deer with corn or alfalfa is giving them food that they simply cannot digest, because their bacteria cannot adapt fast enough.
In addition, because deer normally eat very little in winter, their bacteria diminish in number. This increases the difficulty of breaking down the type of fiber in alfalfa, and the undigested fiber becomes a compacted mass and may cause fatal intestinal blockage. Corn, another commonly used feed, is not a natural food for deer: its high starch content upsets the balance of bacterial species in the rumen and favors acid-producing microbes. The resulting acid buildup can lead to inflammation and infection of the rumen.
Feeding deer also has the unintended consequence of increasing predation by concentrating deer in a predictable location. Under natural circumstances, deer make extensive networks of escape trails. When they stay near a feeding site, however, they do not develop multiple escape routes.
The attraction of a feeding station concentrates unnaturally high numbers of deer together, thus increasing the transmission of parasites and diseases such as tuberculosis, mange, and chronic wasting disease. And ironically, because feeding areas are usually near human habitation, predation by free-roaming domestic dogs and death by vehicle collisions may inflict as many losses as no feeding at all.
Deer, even those in captivity, spontaneously reduce their food intake in the colder months. While deer can lose up to 30 percent of their body weight, this is recovered once foliage returns in the spring. In fact a good layer of fat, laid on in spring and summer, is a deer’s best insurance for winter survival.
If you want to do something for the deer in your neighborhood, try managing your woods to increase spring and summer forage. Many forestry practices benefit deer either by encouraging young, nutritious vegetation or by retaining mature beech trees and oaks, whose acorns and beech nuts are an important deer food. Clearing around old apple trees encourages the trees to bear more fruit – yet another important fall food. These approaches are much more healthy for deer than artificial winter feeding and help to maintain a herd that is in balance with its food supply.