Beside the Stream

Breatharians, who claim to live on sunlight and water, seemed like an absurd impossibility until I see mule deer in winter.  With so much snow on the ground there is nothing for these mule deer to eat except twigs.  I looked up research papers on mule deer diet, and found that in the winter the deer live on a starvation diet of twigs and lichen, and lose 20% of their body weight.  One of the species whose twigs they enjoy is gambel oak, and the mountain behind us is covered in it.  So these deer really do live on almost nothing for the season… on twigs. 

For Christmas this year, I put out the old pumpkins and gourds we grew for Halloween mistakenly thinking that since deer eat pumpkins in the garden if they can, it’d make a nice holiday treat for the herd. 

It took more than a week for ten deer to eat four old pumpkins.  The deer didn’t seem hungry, and clearly weren’t thinking of Christmas. 

It’s not that the deer didn’t like the pumpkins; it’s that they didn’t really want them.  And they didn’t need them. 

The winter continues, and our little local band of mule deer continues to eat almost nothing. 

The neighbors feed the birds a few cups of seeds and cracked corn each day, and the deer path across our property went to their feeding station. 

For a few days last week nearly a dozen deer started moving obsessively back and forth along the path, back and forth.  There was a frantic note to the herd’s restlessness.  Bob put out about 4 cups of alfalfa pellets at the start of the path, and the whole scene immediately calmed down.  We didn’t add very many calories to the landscape to change the tone. 

This is the same buck with the uneven antlers as the one eating pumpkin at Christmas, but this is after nearly two months of winter starvation.  The snow is deep and has been deep all along, and it’s crusted so he’s still confined to paths.  The herd has been living on twigs up the hill and a little birdseed and cracked corn put out by the neighbor, and just a little of the cracked corn I put out for the turkeys.  Two months of a starvation diet, and they’re not starving.  We’re living with Breatharians in our midst.