Winter and its accompanying cold weather are here despite the occasional roller coaster ride of changing temperatures. While the cold weather is ideal for winter outdoor sports enthusiasts, it is less than an ideal situation for Pennsylvania’s state mammal — the whitetail deer.
Despite sporadic warmer days, winter accumulations of snow and ice create a major problem for deer. Deer are browsers and the average whitetail weighs less than 100 pounds, but each requires the consumption of 2-7 pounds of vegetation per day to remain healthy.
While this essential amount of food is plentiful and easy to obtain during the fair-weather days of spring, summer, fall and warmer periods in winter, it becomes more difficult to find food when snow covers the land for days or weeks at a time. It is a critical time for deer survival, but it is not an invitation for individuals to begin providing food for deer.
Feeding deer, elk and black bears is illegal in Pennsylvania, and the food provided by well-meaning people can be very detrimental to certain wildlife. A trophy bull elk was found dead in Pennsylvania’s elk range in Byrnedale, Elk County, in January 2014, and tests indicated the 6x7-point bull died from rumen acidosis, a disorder that affects wild deer and elk, as well as domestic animals such as cattle and sheep.
Supplemental feeding of wild animals by humans is often linked to this disorder and is brought on by a sudden introduction of carbohydrates, usually grain and often corn, in an animal’s diet. The diets of deer and elk vary in the wild by their home ranges and often change throughout the year.
Deer and elk adjust to accommodate those changes, but if their diets change suddenly rather than gradually, their bodies are unable to digest the newly introduced food. If they eat enough of that food, it can kill them as in the case of the elk.
An elk’s diet is made up mostly of grasses and other soft vegetation, and when the bull suddenly overloaded on corn, its body produced too much lactic acid in an attempt to digest the introduced food and caused its death. The bull possibly came in contact with the corn because someone thought their actions would help the elk and/or other wildlife in the area. It was found after a frigid cold snap, which is a time when concerned individuals often begin worrying about the survival of wildlife.
Like the case of this elk, intentional feeding can have a counter effect, thus harming the animal instead of helping it, which is why a key focus of the Pennsylvania Game Commission is to sustain a healthy, natural habitat for a healthy deer population as part of its management plan. When there are too many deer concentrated in one area during the winter, the food supply becomes depleted and starvation is likely to set in. Finding acorns and other food sources on the ground is difficult when layers of snow cover the food. Ice storms tend to compound these problems.
Deer subsist by browsing on woody growth such as twigs and tree buds during the winter, and if there are too many deer, all plant growth within reach is consumed. A browse line about five feet above the ground is apparent in areas that have too many deer, and fawns and under-nourished deer are more likely to die if there is a shortage of food.
One of the harsh realities of nature is that deer do not take care of their offspring first, which is why only the strongest and healthiest survive. A key to deer management is to keep populations at a level where the habitat will support the deer numbers.
Providing food for deer tends to cause deer to gather in a specific area, and this concentration can also cause the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease in deer and elk. CWD attacks the brain in deer and elk and produces small lesions that result in death.
February and March are the most difficult months for deer in Pennsylvania. Only time and the weather conditions will determine the survival numbers of our deer population this winter, but providing unnatural food sources is certain to have a negative impact.