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Deer manage through the winter by keeping warm beneath their hides and by digging through snow to uncover grasses. Note that "old" grass retains much of its nutrient value. It's just dry and brown. Deer also nibble on any trees or on bushes that have any leaves left on them. They even eat bark and twigs, which they don't do in the "greener" times of the year. Certainly anything like sagebrush that keeps its foliage all the time is food. Note that wildlife biologists encourage folks not to feed deer in winter. Winter feeding is done in rare cases where deer, elk, or the like gather in large herds within protected areas (where there is no hunting and limited predation), but this is the exception. Deer will browse on any plants they can get their teeth on in winter. Vegetation varies a lot throughout the range of these animals, so what is available in one locale isn't necessarily on the menu in another. But there is browse available for the animals or they wouldn't be there. Deer move around through a given year, and a lot of the shifts involve a change in altitude. By moving to lower elevations in the winter, they avoid the deeper snows that make their food too hard to get at.

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16y ago

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