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My penchant for exploring Southeast Alaska's wild places had me tracing a low-tide shoreline one cloudy summer afternoon, studying the rocks and beached marine life. Unoccupied crab shells dotted the wet sand, mingling with the strewn kelp. At last I looked up, scanning the horizon for a moment. What was that? Something was swimming parallel to shore out in the bay. An otter? Seal? Whale?

The shape of a head sporting the branched, bony growth of antlers came into focus, a phenomenon rarely found atop otters, seals or whales. Deer, incredibly, are very good swimmers and our local Sitka black-tailed deer are no exception. They are often seen swimming along for miles in the saltwater, propelled forward by the paddling action of their unlikely hooves.

Not ones to wear their PFDs, the deer instead rely on the inherent buoyancy resulting from air trapped in the insulating, hollow, hair shafts of their winter coat. They will also enter the frigid water to eradicate the scent trail when a predator gives chase, as I observed one day when a deer ran out of the woods, sped across the beach into the saltwater, swam out a short distance, then turned and continued on a parallel course to the shoreline for a couple hundred yards, emerged and headed back up into the forest. Hopefully it outsmarted the wolves that day.

Most Southeast Alaskans are well acquainted with the pervasive Sitka black-tailed deer, a welcome neighbor when not eating our gardens and a significant source of our food supply. We frequently observe them nibbling grass along a roadway, sometimes retreating in their bouncing style, other times confounding us with indecision as we try to proceed past them safely and unhindered by deer parts on our windshield.

Inside the woods, deer seek food and shelter in different locations as the seasons change. This winter, on Prince of Wales Island, the relative lack of snow is a nice break for the deer after some recent heavy snow years like last year when I photographed the deer pictured. Deer will eat seaweed if forced to the beach by snow, but it isn't very nutritious or digestible and, under this circumstance, probably indicates they are in danger of starvation.

Their winter dietary intake, even in a good year, is not sufficient to maintain a positive energy balance. Body mass will decrease throughout the winter as they use up stored fat reserves from summer, so availability of digestible, nutritious forage is very important to support health and even life.

If snow covers favorite plants such as the evergreen leaves of bunchberry, deer are forced to eat more woody plants like blueberry twigs and western hemlock seedlings found up off the ground on nurse logs, providing little nutrition. Even in more protected old growth forests where the canopy deters deep snow accumulation and may offer taller shrubs for browse, the woody nature of the forage is not optimal. Once their fat reserves are gone, deer are more or less behind the curve and the insubstantial foods they find cannot help them recover.

Luckily, this year snow is a stranger, things are different and deer should be prospering. They will live to return to their nutritious, delicious spring forage - shoots of sedge and beach grass, skunk cabbage, fiddleheads, and the leaves of shrubs like blueberry and false azalea. Later they'll enjoy devil's club and crab apple leaves, rhizomes of ferns, mushrooms and arboreal lichen to name a very few. Sitka black-tailed deer are a fascinating, integral member of our temperate rainforest community.

Carla Petersen is a remote-living artist and writer. Contact her at whalepassoriginals@gmail.com.