FISHERIES, GAME AND FORESTS. [65 



While the Adirondack deer subsists largely on arboreous food, its aliment may be 

 said to be the same as that of all gramnivorous animals, with such variation or restric- 

 tion as is enforced by its forest habitat. Although it will eat readily the same food as 

 that of our horses, cows, and sheep, it is forced by its life in the woods to subsist on 

 forms of vegetation which our domestic animals would not touch except when suffering 

 from starvation. 



In spring the deer feed or "browse" on the young, tender shoots, on the new 

 leaves, and on herbs of various kinds. In summer they may be seen along the shores 

 of lakes, ponds, or streams, where they feed on aquatic plants. At this season they 

 are especially fond of the tender, succulent weed, growing in shallow water, — a 

 species of carex or sparganium, — known as deer grass. In feeding on this plant the 

 animal will thrust its head entirely under water in order to crop the stems as near the 

 root as possible. In the summer, also, deer will crop the grass which grows in the old, 

 abandoned log-roads in the woods ; and along the outskirts of the wilderness they are 

 seen at times grazing in company with cows on pasture land. They eat also the leaves 

 of sapling trees, young maples especially, and while watching them it is interesting to 

 see how high they will reach for the leaves, and how skillful they are in pulling down 

 branches which they will hold and feed from at the same time. 



As the fall months come on they retire from the water courses and lakes, and seek 

 higher ground, where they subsist on briers, ferns, raspberry and elder bushes. If it 

 is a beechnut year they may be found on the hardwood ridges where the beeches grow, 

 feeding on the nuts that are thickly scattered on the ground. A beechnut year makes 

 fat bucks. During the winter the deer are obliged to subsist on buds, mosses, bark, 

 lichens, fungi, and certain species of evergreens, the cedar and hemlock boughs that 

 hang low enough furnishing a large part of their food. The ground hemlock ( Taxus 

 Canadensis) supplies a good share of their winter sustenance, this low evergreen shrub 

 being cropped closely wherever it is found. 



If the winter is long and severe, and the snow deep, they will eat the wood}- portion 

 of some twigs, cropping the terminal branches of maple saplings until nothing is left ; 

 but mere sticks, sometimes an inch in thickness, where bitten off by the famished 

 creatures. They will also paw the snow away with their hoofs in search of beechnuts 

 which may be hidden beneath the surface. As there are no oak or chestnut trees in 

 the Adirondack forests, they are deprived of the favorite acorn and nutritious nut which 

 these species furnish, and which in other regions are readily eaten by the common 

 white- tailed deer. 



In winter the Adirondack deer frequent the vicinity of lumber camps and places 

 where log-choppers are felling trees, feeding at night on the tree tops which are found 

 there lying on the ground. They visit the frozen lakes and ponds where, by walking 



