Vanishing habitat affecting deer herd

To the editor:
    In 2003, I noticed that deer had eaten some of the needles off the cedar trees and hedges at my summer home on East Grand Lake in Orient. When I checked the place out in the winter of 2006, I would see 15 to 20 deer in the area. It got so bad that one of my neighbors pulled all his cedar out and replaced it with hemlock saplings because he read deer would not eat hemlock. The next spring the hemlock leaves and also the leaves on small birch trees had been eaten. Starving deer will eat anything.
    I learned that as the value of cedar tree products rose, the harvesting of cedar also increased to the point that some of our traditional cedar swamps were disappearing. Winter deer yards were in cedar swamps. The deer would trample the deep snow and reach up to nibble on their favorite food — cedar needles. In 2008, after finding all my cedar had died, I replaced them with perennial flowers.
Elbridge Gagnon
Houlton