As brought up by nbbucks, current forestry practices are reducing the amount of forage left for our deer population. The push in the industry is for wood volume and mostly softwood wood volume at all costs following clearcut harvest: site prep, plant, herbicide (sometimes twice or even three times), precommercial thin (maybe, maybe not, depends on how everything else went), commercial thin (once, more likely twice) final harvest. Do you know what the plan is at each stage? To remove all competition other than conifers. The worst practice is the conversion of mixed wood stand types into pure softwood stands. We used to have more intolerant hardwoods in softwood plantations following clearcut harvest. It is all about the m3/ha/year. We still live in the age of pulp and paper with little focus on other products.
We are even converting tolerant mixed wood stands into uniform age class plantations because the percent thresholds set by DNR are too lax. I caution you to not only focus on how important deer wintering areas are. DWAs may be important, but IMO we have other problems.