MAINE, Maine — This season, hunters have harvested over 42,000 deer, and that number continues to grow as expanded archery and muzzleloader hunting continues until Saturday, December 10.
According to Nathan Bieber, a deer biologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, before this hunting season, the highest deer harvest was set back in 1959 at 41,735 deer.
“It’s just one of those benchmark numbers that you haven’t seen a lot historically and any time you are pushing the boundaries and you are breaking records, it is always worth noting," Bieber said. “I think it’s a good talking point that gets people excited about the season.”
Over the last five hunting seasons, deer harvest totals have reached mid to low 30,000s.
2017: 27,233
2018: 32,451
2019: 28,323
2020: 33,159
2021: 38,947
Bieber said the rise in deer harvests can be attributed to a recent change in deer permits. As of this season, deer hunters were able to harvest a doe and then continue buck hunting.
Though the number of deer harvests is at an all-time high, it isn’t all about sport. Bieber went on to say, there are many reasons to maintain a healthy deer population.
“Our goal really was not, ‘We want to kill more does every year.’ Our goal is to better hit our target numbers. Whether they are higher or whether they are lower. It’s all about trying to improve our precision, not necessarily take more does every year, here and into the future.”
According to Bieber, deer hunting seasons work as a tool for keeping other deer, the environment, and people, healthy and safe.
"We want our deer to be healthy deer. We don't want malnourished deer that are not reaching their true potential in terms of growth and reproductive capability. We want humans to be happy too," Bieber said. "We want people to not be stressed out about damage that deer are causing to their property or their kid driving to their friend's house at night and encountering deer on the road, and then there's environment. We want deer browsing to not be so impactful that it's limiting plant diversity, which can have impacts on diversity of other species. So it's really all things."
The goal for game managers like Bieber, is to control doe populations in certain areas to maintain a healthy deer population overall. He said does are “the engine” moving the populations up or down.
The change in permits for this season was designed to lower the number of does in certain parts of the state. After this season’s record numbers, tweaks may be made to the permitting system in accordance with doe populations next season.
The main tool game managers have for maintaining healthy doe populations are sportsmen. Bieber said the large number of deer on the landscape helps keep those sportsmen excited and involved, which important to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife because it would be impossible to maintain healthy populations on its own.
Though large deer harvests help keep human conflict levels low and reduce the negative impacts deer can have on biodiversity, ultimately sportsmen play a small roll in population levels according to Bieber.
“What we’re able to achieve through regulated hunting is, I think just barely putting our finger on the scales of deer going up and down. I think the really big controlling thing that regulates deer numbers are things like year-to-year weather patterns, long term climate changes, changes in land use practices, the really big forces like that. And it is mostly to alleviate conflict levels, reduce impacts on the environment," Bieber said.