Fall game harvest was bountiful

By V. Paul Reynolds

Despite this era of hyper computerization, it still takes time for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to nail down a final tally of the previous fall’s 2023 big game harvest. However, the department’s website dashboard of harvested game does list what it calls “preliminary figures.” Translation: Some of the tagging stations are slow to report, and it takes time for the tagging reports to be re-examined and validated.

Based on the department’s preliminary harvest figures, here is how it shaped up:

Moose 2,545 (This includes the traditional hunt and the adaptive unit hunt)

Deer  38,214

Turkeys  1,000

Bear  3,269

For traditional season moose hunters, the success ratio hovered around 64 per cent, significantly less for the adaptive unit hunt, which is strictly a cow hunt. Yes, the Maine moose hunts are not as easy as they once were.

Deer hunters, who were able to hunt both a doe and a buck for the second year, fared pretty well, but not as well as the previous fall of 2022. This is what I wrote in the fall of 2022: “The final fall deer harvest numbers are very impressive. At this writing, Maine deer hunters have tagged close to 44,000 deer, according to the game harvest dashboard on the website of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. That number eclipses last year’s figures by a margin of about 14 percent, which is a 50-year record!”

That record deer harvest was thought to be attributable to both the revised antlerless hunt, which allowed hunters for the first time to take a doe and then go for the trophy buck, and good hunt conditions, including an early tracking snow.

As MDIF&W’s communications director, Mark Latti, points out, this past fall’s harvest of 38,214 whitetails is nothing to sneeze about. When the final deer harvest numbers are out, the figure is likely to be higher. The preliminary figure alone places the harvest among Maine’s top ten deer harvest years!

And, while Maine’s deer recovery process is making headway, the North Woods deer numbers remain anemic. This is clearly illustrated when you break the deer harvest down by Wildlife Management Districts (WMDs). In northernmost Maine, in WMDs 1-6, which comprises about a third of Maine’s woodlands, a total of only about 1,000 deer were tagged for that entire area! Compare that figure with the deer harvest in WMD’s south of Bangor, in which the deer harvest in just a single WMD was often three times the harvest in the entire northern area of six WMDs.

Along with favorable hunt conditions and the revised antlerless deer regulations, predator control programs, especially the culling of coyotes around deer wintering areas has made a positive contribution to recovering deer populations in Maine.

Over the long haul, it is likely that MDIF&W’s program of purchasing major deer yards and protecting them in perpetuity will also increase whitetail survival throughout the state including northernmost  Maine.

As I  wrote in the fall of 2022, “I never expected in my time to witness a whitetail reformation of this magnitude. Much of this reformation is Nature based, but assorted groups of policy makers, biologists and Maine conservationist groups also share the credit.”  

The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide and host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network. He has authored three books. Online purchase information is available at www.sportingjournal.com, Outdoor Books.