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By TRAVIS BARRETT
Outdoors Writer 09/12/2008

  
The state’s leading deer biologist expects hunters to meet with frustration this fall.

“What I’m trying to make people understand is that they should lower their expectations,” Lee Kantar of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife said this week.
“Fawns from a winter like last year’s don’t over-winter very well. We’ve got the deer harvest slated to be down about 5,000 deer this year.”

That’s a drop of more than 18 percent, a significant hit to the fortunes of Maine’s hunters, who will learn whether or not they were selected in the annual any-deer permit lottery today.

DIF&W will issue just more than 50,000 doe permits across Maine this fall, down from the more than 66,000 issued last year.

The reason, of course, was the near-record snowfall from last winter, which took a significant toll on the state’s deer herd. The unusually cool and wet spring and summer months we experienced may have helped those deer who did survive last winter, allowing them to fatten up and get healthier heading into this season, Kantar said.

But the real issue were those deer who never made it through the winter at all. Though just less than 30,000 deer were taken by hunters in 2007, Kantar expects this year’s number to be closer to 24,000 deer.

“It was very, very harsh and severe winter,” said Keel Kemper, a local wildlife biologist stationed in Sidney. “In many ways, deer science is rocket science — and we’ve accounted for the winter mortality.”

That mortality rate may be another example of nature’s sometimes complex — albeit cruel — checks-and-balances system.
Fewer doe permits have been issued this season, but in recent years, Kemper reported, most doe tags went unfilled. Many hunters who apply for doe permits carry them as “fall-back” plans — hunting bucks for most of the season and saving the doe permit for the final days of the season when they have no luck.

“We know that statewide, we’re probably not meeting our doe quota,” Kemper said. “We haven’t been achieving that for quite some time. We’re consistently about 20 percent short of the number.”

In simple math, that means that of the 66,000 doe permits issued for 2007, roughly 13,000 went unfulfilled.
Kantar said such a low return rate on doe permits — issued as the state’s most significant means for controlling deer population, by, obviously, keeping the number of reproducing females in check — is closely monitored by DIF&W.

“If we underharvest our number, we are aware of that,” Kantar said. “It’s science-based, but that doesn’t mean that we’re dealing with absolutes. We know that, and we stay on top of that year after year after year.”

Still Kemper would urge hunters to contribute.

“Do your part for wildlife management and shoot your doe,” Kemper said.
 
Travis Barrett — 621-5648
tbarrett@centralmaine.com

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