LEVANT – A bag of cookies given out here, a coffee break there. A state biologist’s task of checking deer taken during hunting season could appear to be a bit of a party to an observer. But this year, the necessary field work was worthy of some celebration.

During a firearm season that racked up what could be a record buck tally, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife biologists have been inspecting the antlers and teeth from what has proved to be one of the healthiest-looking deer herds in years.

“One difference,” DIFW deer leader Gerry Lavigne said Wednesday while traveling on his data-gathering route, “is that for four consecutive years now we’ve had mild winters. That’s good for fawn development. The deer we’re seeing that are 31/2, 41/2 years old are in excellent condition. The acorns are also making fat deer. There are a lot of oak trees in Hancock County, and in this section [greater Bangor], and in Augusta.”

For more than 20 years Lavigne has been collecting data on deer, visiting meat cutters from Dover-Foxcroft to Bangor. For the past 10 he has visited the Bemis Farm in Levant, a 100-year-old family business where a coffee break follows this end-of-the-line stop. Lavigne heads there after stopping at Willie’s Custom Deer Cutting, a home-grown business that has flourished with the deer herd – and where home-baked cookies reward the biologist’s work.

“The deer are now in really good shape,” said Willie Campbell, owner of Willie’s. “This year, they are in the best shape. There is more fat. I’ve seen only 10 small deer.”

A small sample of small deer, considering Campbell processed 132 deer through Friday. Campbell said the majority of the deer he’s seen have been between 150 and 180 pounds.

Many bucks close to 200 pounds have been tagged statewide in the last two weeks, which says a lot about the healthy herd. Lavigne said a study done 40 years ago in Maine and New Hampshire showed that, at the end of breeding season, bucks will lose 25 percent of their body weight. This past week, the last of firearm season, was the peak of the rut.

Lavigne said that biologists monitored 8,000 hunter-killed deer (or about 25 percent of the herd) last year and are on schedule to examine the same percentage this year.

Two-thirds of the deer checked by Maine biologists come from visits to meat cutters, while the rest are checked at tagging stations, roadside check stations, as well as at sporting camps or in hunters’ homes. Generally, Lavigne said, meat cutters are the biggest aid to biologists in data collection because they set aside deer parts that are normally discarded.

On his “deer data routes” Lavigne checks the size of the antlers and the teeth to determine the age. Lavigne said the teeth are worn down in distinct patterns depending on the age of the animal and he can determine with near certainty the age of deer that are 7 years old and younger.

Were he to see many young bucks with nubs for antlers, Lavigne said he would grow concerned about the health of the herd. Wednesday evening, he saw one such deer at Willie’s, but said, based on what he’s seen this season, it was an aberration.

“This is a strange individual,” Lavigne said. “If we saw a deer population like that, it would mean the population was way too high for the available food supply.”

Of course, every once in a while, Lavigne sees an aberration that pleases him.

This month he saw a 27-year-old black bear a hunter had taken. When he went to collect data on it, Lavigne saw it was one he had tagged for research purposes some 20 years ago. How does that make the veteran biologist feel?

“Amazed. No regret. Just amazed,” Lavigne said.

Wardens’ work never done

Somewhere north of Greenville, off a frozen logging road, wardens may sit and wait in the dark after deer season ends today. They may position their electronic deer and stake out one last night hunter. It’s what wardens Joel Wilkinson and Adam Gormely did much of the time for the past month.

How often?

“I go out [with the dummy deer] a lot,” Gormely said.

Every day?

“I go out a lot,” was his final answer.

It’s a lot of work to do to catch poachers some of the time. It paid off Monday night near Greenville, but amounted to nothing Tuesday evening after spending four hours going to a frozen, nondescript place and waiting.

There’s a bit of mystique to the racket. For good reason. The wardens don’t want people to know how or where they do it. But what is interesting about the setup is that it is not obvious – and the aftermath can be the stuff of Bruce Willis movies.

The deer are realistic enough, but not planted out in the open. Wilkinson said this is because wardens are not targeting “opportunists” so much as night hunters.

The difference, he said, is that opportunists are people who poach when nature presents an easy shot at a deer, while “night hunters” are those who hunt after dark for the “thrill of it.”

And “thrill” would be the best word to describe the process that can ensue with the handing out of the summons, as Wilkinson said many poachers don’t react peaceably, some even violently. Gormely put it more pointedly.

“You can’t go if there is a high-speed chase,” he said Tuesday to an attendant reporter. “It isn’t safe. And you won’t like the fishtails.”

Yet all the waiting and action-packed drama is just one task in a warden’s day.

The night before Tuesday’s stakeout, Gormely was out looking for a lost man – after he had been “night hunting” the night hunters. A full night’s work searching the woods, again, more or less for naught.

The wayward hunter from Massachusetts found his way out of the woods by dawn.

“Most of them do,” said warden Don Annis. “One out of nine will be in trouble. We go looking for that one.”

Junior hunter catches buck feverJohn Williams of Clifton has only been hunting one season. Yet with his grandfather, Phil McTigue of Holden, the 10-year-old bagged his first deer – a 212-pound, 12-point buck. That, after shooting a black bear.

Williams, who attends Holbrook School, shot both animals in Eddington and had the adult male bear tagged at Clifton Country Store on Nov. 15 and the buck on Nov. 20.

“It made me nervous,” Williams said of his first buck. “He was all big. My heart was pounding. I was kind of scared, because if I missed, I missed a really big deer.”

However, getting up at 5 a.m. didn’t bother the fifth-grader.

“I don’t have to get up for school until 7 [a.m.],” Williams said. “But I usually get up at 6. I like getting up and sitting around early in the morning, I guess.”

A future hunter, no doubt.