This week the deer disappeared. Last week, there were 35. This winter, the deer were as thick as fleas on a dog’s back, literally standing head-to-head in droves, roaming in and out of the woods and yards of the quiet village of Rockwood. At one count in a late afternoon, there were 92. On the other side of the Moose River, there were 40. Then, incredibly, there were none. Gone, until next winter.

For as long as anyone can remember, herds of deer have come in from the forests that lie beyond this settlement to winter at the edges of the woods, where the steep slopes of the Blue Ridge mountain meet the Moose River and the leafy hardwoods turn to the thick, soft cover of the evergreens.

As soon as the snow flies, the deer begin to show up. Bucks come in alone. Does lead in their fawns. Soon the woods on one side of the bank are teeming with the animals, which at first are hard to see, but then the twitch of white-tails leads the untrained eye to the thick bodies of tens of deer, hair camouflaged to look like so many of the tree trunks they imitate in the wild.

For generations the deer seemed to have known this would make just about the perfect place to wait out the winter safely, with plenty of cover, browse and trails to drinking water. And for generations, they have seemingly managed to live side by side in the company of a few human neighbors.

Though not officially called a deer-yard, it is common knowledge that herds of deer do migrate near the banks of the Moose River every year. They arrive in late fall like clockwork. And people count on it. They watch for them. They feed them. And they are astonished by them. They say no matter how often you see a wild animal, to see it up close is unforgettable. Grandchildren stand wide-eyed as they nudge up to a fawn with a morsel. Then, to see so many up close, so thickly settled, is remarkable and, as if in testament, another Sunday driver stops to get a picture.

State biologists don’t like it. They say the extra feed given to the deer concentrates the herds into a small area and ends up, in the long run, leaving them vulnerable to predation, starvation, disease, car accidents and overcrowding.

But the struggle between Nature and Nurture – whether to let wild deer alone or help them along – is as age old as the settlement between the animal and the human. The few people surrounding these deer in times past have fed them for years. They feel connected to them. They say some of the deer are tame. Many of the deer look up expectantly when you walk by. They will feed out of the palm of your hand. Neighbors say these deer probably drop down from a game preserve in Tomhegan, where many deer are fed through the summer months by tourists lodging at a nearby sporting camp. Most, they say, come from scattered directions throughout the forest and are very much still wild.

The Rockwood deer look healthy. But the numbers coming to the woods by the river are expanding. Where neighbors say the herds used to be small, there are now many more. In the late afternoon, it’s become a regular practice to take a drive and watch where one very large herd continues to settle down in a new neighborhood that is springing up in a subdivision among the trees. The new people moving into the new lots also feed the deer.

So as the deer habitat changes from woods to houses, just how those changes will affect the deer, and the people who live there, aren’t yet known. Where once a few people fed the deer is now blossoming to the many. As one neighbor said, he knows the deer shouldn’t be fed, but they are a marvel to watch. Another said he sees no problem with feeding deer, as long as they are fed the right food.

On the other side of the river, another 50 or so deer settle down in the woods near an open field for the winter. For the past seven years they have been treated to daily feeds of grain by neighbor Betty Reckards.

Reckards said she first started feeding them when she saw two bone-thin deer cross her yard to get to the water. Concerned they wouldn’t make it through a tough winter, she said she made a commitment to feed them.

On the one side of the river, the deer are learning to live among the houses and cohabitate with people. On the other side, they are fed twice a day, but are jumpy. They flee at the sight of anyone but the feeder.

Deer biologist Gerry Lavigne cautions against feeding deer, but said that if you must, people need to make the commitment to feed them the right kind of food and stick with it because if the deer become dependent then are left without, they could die of starvation.

Reckards agrees. “There is a right way and a wrong way to feed deer. You have to make that commitment all winter long, every single day,” she said, though she respectfully disagrees with biologists on some points about the feeding of deer. “I realize biologists have their job to do and are right on many, many things. But if a deer is starving, you can make a difference.”

Reckards speaks candidly about why she feeds them and holds to a certain philosophy about deer. She believes in keeping a healthy distance from the deer and not hand-feeding them. She won’t look them in the eye because she observed it makes them nervous, causing a fight or flight response. From a distance she watches the deer on both sides of the river, but doesn’t believe in trying to tame them. She buys commercial grain and leaves individual piles loosely scattered through a section of the nearby field. That way, she said, the bucks don’t kick out the fawns and everyone gets a chance to eat. Nature, she said, does weed out the sick and the old, regardless of the feeding.

She said she doesn’t want to know what it costs her to feed them, but she does go through 75 pounds of commercial grain a day. She said she has seen a gradual increase in the population of the winter deer even when she wasn’t feeding them, which leads her to believe the changes in forest cutting practices and more commercial development have driven deer from other habitat. She said she can expect to see the annual pilgrimage of the deer to Rockwood start in December. Then sometime in late April, every day for about a two-week period. the herd becomes fewer and fewer, until one day none are left.

If feeding is to take place Lavigne, who has been studying deer since 1975, stresses the importance of providing balanced food. He recommends commercial grain because it has the right amount of protein, energy and fiber that deer require.

Corn, oats and apples are acceptable but he said they don’t provide enough of a balanced diet to keep deer healthy. Donuts and other junk food are a real danger, he said, because they are high-energy foods that cause the bacteria that helps digestion in the deer’s stomach to overpopulate, eventually causing the bacteria to eat out the lining of the gut. Lavigne said deer are a lot like cattle in that they can’t handle too much junk food and can die from it. Likewise, he said vegetable scraps are just as bad but for a different reason; they don’t provide enough energy for the animal and, if fed just veggies, can result in the animal literally starving to death. Hay, he said, is too difficult for deer to digest and causes its own set of problems.

He also cautioned that feeding deer can lead to unintended long-term consequences, as in the case of a retired game warden in the Rangeley area who found a total of 70 deer carcasses near three sites where the animals have been fed for decades. Last spring, Lavigne said he saw 10 deer that died of starvation within a couple of hundred yards of a feeder. In Michigan, the feeding of deer became so prevalent that he said an epidemic of bovine tuberculosis broke out among deer herds and was transmitted to cattle farms in seven counties. He said the state had to ban deer feeding. In Maine, Lavigne said the state believes education is the better answer.

As man and beast continue to bump into one another, one thing is for sure, no one, not the biologists nor the residents, knows quite how our role will play out in the balance of Nature versus Nurture. What we hold in our minds versus what we hold in our hearts remains a mysteriously complicated connection.

Outdoor writer Suzanne AuClair has been covering the Moosehead Lake region in various publications for the past eight years. She can be reached at suzauclair@prexar.com.