Maine’s deer herd numbers approximately 360,000 animals, a historic high, according to a state biologist.
This year, the state hopes hunters will take 15,500 doe deer, up from the goal of 13,383 last year, in central and southern Maine in order for the herd to winter well and have healthy babies in the spring, said Nathan Bieber, who has been a deer biologist with the state for more than six years.
Hunters killed a total of 43,787 deer last year, breaking a 1959 record of 41,735. The total includes archery, expanded archery, youth hunt, firearms and muzzleloader seasons.
Maine’s deer herd is managed primarily through the annual hunting seasons. Firearms season constitutes 85 percent of the deer harvest. The 2023 firearms deer season opens on Saturday, Oct. 28, for Maine residents and on Oct. 30 for everyone.
“It’s getting to the point where the farther south you go, [hunters] can’t get enough does to keep the populations down,” he said.
The deer population has grown in southern coastal and central Maine. Aroostook County’s winter conditions really affect the population there, he said. Mild winters mean a better survival rate, although there are fewer wintering grounds.
Reproduction is pretty stable, he said, even though this year’s rainy and cold spring at peak birthing time made it harder for the fawns to survive.
The state is keeping close tabs on the number of deer added to the herd each year through a project that relies on observation data from the public in August and September.
The project, which is in its fourth year, started just before the COVID-19 pandemic so a lot of people engaged in it while they were staying home. People were asked to keep an eye on does that were raising fawns into the fall and how many babies there were per doe, Bieber said.
The herd is in winter coat and healthy, and still has plenty of food going into the colder months. Mast crops, such as acorns and beechnuts, are readily available, and the leaves staying on the trees longer means more food too, the biologist said.
Maine is fortunate that it doesn’t have a lot of the diseases seen in other places, such as chronic wasting disease and epizootic hemorrhagic disease, although EHD is on its way here, Bieber said. It’s already in New Hampshire.
The state continues to monitor per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS) in deer and turkeys after finding a concentration of the chemicals in animals that live in a certain area of Fairfield in 2021.
Research has moved to several locations in Unity, Albion, Thorndike and Knox, but the areas are not as heavily contaminated and are more spread out than the Fairfield site, said Mark Latti, communications director for Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.
Samples from deer and turkeys in those areas were sent in September to a national laboratory for testing and the state is awaiting results, he said.
In Maine, biologists will take antler ear diameter measurements, look at teeth, check the sex of the deer and collect lymph nodes to test for chronic wasting disease, plus test for COVID-19 at tagging stations, Bieber said.
The COVID-19 testing is part of a nationwide study. COVID has been found in deer in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Iowa among other areas, but not yet in Maine.
