Land of plenty: Austria's red deer feast on handouts and live half the year in fenced enclosures. Can they still fend for themselves?

My first encounter with a rare herd of red deer wintering in the Austrian Alps came after a four-hour ascent on skis through snowed-in forests and steep terrain. The reward for my exertion was a perfect view of 160 animals, whose dark-brown bodies stood out sharply against the snow-covered pasture that spread before me. They picked their way across the concave meadow, grazing on odd bits of weathered vegetation that poked through the windswept snow. The sun shone in a glorious blue sky, while an icy wind whistled through the gaps in a pile of boulders behind which I had sought refuge. From that vantage, I could see another large herd loitering in the wintry meadows that rose on the far side of the valley, a mile away.

My search for red deer had been prompted by the tales of elderly hunters. Herds of several hundred animals, the hunters told me, had once roamed the harsh, alpine environment year-round. Yet by the time I began my quest, it was widely assumed that the alpine pastures had become summer-only grazing grounds. Come autumn the herds all supposedly descended to lower elevations for the shorter winters and the more plentiful food. Even more at variance with prevailing opinion was that any herd still lived completely independent of human care. Under Austria's game-management program, red deer are supplied with hearty meals throughout the winter--often inside fenced enclosures. So entrenched was the belief in the necessity of that program to the deer's survival that several experienced hunters had tried to convince me that what I was seeking was absurd. A large herd could not winter above timberline without supplemental food. And yet, there they were.

But twenty years have now passed since that day, still so vivid in my mind. In 1985 I was just beginning four seasons of fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in biology, studying survival mechanisms in one of the last of the wild alpine herds. When I returned to the alpine meadows ten years later, "my" group of 160 had dwindled to a few scattered individuals. It wasn't the harsh winters that had overcome this remnant wild population, but the very management regimen intended to ensure the species' survival and abundance.

High above tree line, this renegade group had survived nicely on a diet of heather, trailing azalea, tufted hair grass, and the leaves and stems of cowberries and blueberries. The wild herd had avoided the winter feeding stations that pepper the Austrian Alps, and the enclosures where most red deer spend more than half the year. For its insubordination, most of the wild herd was culled in the 1990s--standard practice for deer that decline, to be "civilized." Today only 5 percent of Austria's red-deer population survives without any supplemental feed.

The goal of Austria's red-deer-management scheme--among the world's most intensive--is to keep deer populations large enough to guarantee hunting success without damaging commercial forests or farms. The objective is a worthy one, to be sure. But the program's sheer intensity has tamed the entire hunting endeavor; it now more closely resembles ranching than it does the primeval pursuit of prey. And in truth, it also threatens the long-term stability of red-deer populations.

The red deer (Cervus elaphus) has been the principal game animal in central Europe since the Bronze Age. Deer are abundant, gather in sizable herds, and are large enough to yield about 120 pounds of venison apiece. Hunters have long striven to influence the red-deer populations and the predictability of the animals' movements. By the twelfth century A.D., landowners distributed salt licks to attract deer, a technique so effective that the emperors subsequently forbade it except on sovereign hunting grounds. By 1500, landowners were putting out hay to attract deer, augment their numbers, and lower their losses in severe winters. To this day, supplemental feeding remains the hunters' most powerful management tool.

As firearms became increasingly available in the seventeenth century, noble hunters flaunted their marksmanship by shooting as many animals as possible. By the early twentieth century, hunters became interested in the quality--and particularly, the size of the antlers--of their quarry. Game managers developed an enticing cake of sesame, with equal parts calcium and phosphorus, to promote antler growth.

In 1910, at the First International Hunting Exhibition in Vienna, the term antler was replaced with trophy, a word that, until then, had been reserved for describing the spoils of war. Competitive trophy measurements were standardized in 1927, and a big, heavy, many-pointed rack mounted on a hunter's wall became a status symbol. Thus began the craze for antler size that persists to this day.

When Austria became part of the German Reich in 1938, German hunting laws were imposed. Hunters were required to provide the deer with supplementary food in winter. The intent was to redirect some of the hunters' energy from shooting game to caring for it, thereby preserving enough game to satisfy increasing numbers of hunters. Hunters have happily complied with those laws ever since. By the 1950s, as the Austrian economy was recovering from the Second World War, the duration, frequency, and abundance of winter feeding took off.