After weeks of plugging in data culled from tagging station logbooks, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife has released its annual deer-kill tally for the 2007 season.

Well, almost.

With just a few registration books still unaccounted for, the DIF&W announced this week that Maine hunters tagged 28,884 deer.

That’s just two percent fewer deer than the state’s biologists predicted … and probably a lot more than what many hunters thought it would be. In 2006, hunters killed 29,918 deer.

Lee Kantar, the state’s head deer biologist, said that each year, he and the DIF&W staff hear plenty of reports about lagging deer numbers, but have learned to wait until data begins pouring in before assuming a season is a bust.

“The fall comes, and everybody goes out deer hunting and we hear all the anecdotal information about how well everybody’s doing,” Kantar said. “This year was no exception, meaning that people were thinking it was dismal, they weren’t seeing the harvest, people were going to the local store and not seeing the deer they were accustomed to seeing.”

Even as he hears those anecdotal reports, Kantar and other biologists are traveling the state, studying at deer carcasses and crunching numbers of their own.

“Our biologists, including myself, are going out to the stores and looking at harvested deer, and also going to meat lockers and doing our regular work looking at deer,” Kantar said.

That on-the-hoof research by the biologists isn’t anecdotal at all, and gives the biologists a pretty good picture of the statewide situation.

The 2007 total is higher than the 20-year average of 28,700, but down 1,034 from the 2006 tally.

To break that number down more fully, hunters killed 16,103 bucks and 12,781 antler-less deer in 2007. A year earlier, 16,081 bucks and 13,798 antler-less deer were shot.

Youth hunters, who headed afield for their own special day a week before adults were allowed to hunt, tagged 1,065 deer on that Saturday. That total ranked second to the 1,216 deer tagged on Youth Deer Day in 2006. The most recent youth hunt was the sixth since its inception in 2002.

“What’s interesting I think about youth day, is it was a pretty crappy day,” Kantar said. “I was out that day, checking deer. But the youths got out there and hunted despite the weather.”

In addition, archers participating in the expanded and special seasons tagged 2,236 deer, a 6 percent decrease from a year earlier, while black powder shooters had their best year ever, increasing the 2006 total by about 50 percent and harvesting 1,964 deer.

The black powder success may have had a simple explanation, Kantar said.

“What that [number] points to is, most likely, we had tracking snow,” Kantar said. “People love that in Maine, to get out there and hit that tracking snow, and they obviously did very well.”

The deer harvest over the past 10 years: 2007: 28,884; 2006: 29,918; 2005: 28,148; 2004: 30,926; 2003: 30,313; 2002: 38,153; 2001: 27,769; 2000: 36,885; 1999: 31,473; 1998: 28,241.

Kantar said that despite recent trends to the contrary, a Wildlife Management District in Washington and Hancock counties provided a highlight in 2007.

“District 28, Down East, had its highest buck harvest in over a decade, so that’s surprising,” Kantar said. “That’s good news.”

District 28 sits south of Route 9 and stretches from Clifton in the west to Baring Plantation in the east. It ends near the coast, in towns including Franklin, Cherryfield and East Machias.

The Down East deer herd has been a concern for several years, as the number of deer has decreased. Regular firearms hunters are not allowed to shoot antler-less deer in the zone.

Kantar said 225 bucks were harvested in WMD 28 in 2007. Of those, 165 were shot in Washington County and 60 in Hancock County.

Over the previous three years, the number of bucks shot in WMD has been as low as 99 and as high as 196.

While the spike in deer harvest in WMD 28 is welcome, Kantar cautioned that making assumptions in any district based on one year of data is risky.

“On an annual basis, year to year, it’s hard to get real concrete thoughts, beliefs on what’s really transpiring out there,” Kantar said. “You have to look at what that trend looks like over time.”

Among Maine’s counties, Penobscot again led the pack in deer harvest, with 3,283 killed. Somerset (3,131), Kennebec (2,822), Oxford (2,584) and York (2,531) rounded out the top five.

Coming up …

On Saturday, I’ll share more of Kantar’s thoughts on the state’s deer herd. Chiefly, Kantar talks about the consequences of the harsh winter we’ve all been dealing with.

Deer, as you can imagine, haven’t been immune to the massive amounts of snow we’ve received.

Kantar will tell you what that may mean, to the herd and to the hunter.

jholyoke@bangordailynews.net

990-8214