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Are Trophy Bucks Getting Ever More Dear in Maine?

November 26, 2008 - The Maine Antler and Skull Trophy Club used to publish an annual yearbook of record deer racks, bear skulls and moose antlers reported by hunters.

For the first time in the club's 29-year-history, it is not putting out a trophy yearbook this year because the number of trophy deer (by far the biggest category in the book) has dropped off.

Bob Provencher, a Freeport hunter, said the reason for that is that there are fewer roaming the landscape, especially across the northern forestland.

That breaks with tradition. Trophy bucks were once a legendary part of Maine's hunting legacy in its north woods.

Maine deer biologist Lee Kantar, who analyzed the club's data, said the skull and antler folks are right – but added that there's more to this new chapter in the whitetail saga.

Kantar said the number of bucks taken in southern Maine has increased, even though the number of overall big bucks in Maine has dropped.

During the past 27 years, more of the roughly 150,000 to 180,000 deer hunters in Maine have taken bucks in southern Maine, Kantar said – so much so that the overall number of bucks taken in Maine has increased. It all has to do with how and where the state's herd survives best, and that's in southern Maine, he said.

"It's a combination of factors. Back in the early '70s, the north woods had large blocks of softwood. We've lost 40 percent of that mature softwood in those three to four decades," Kantar said. "The loss of that winter cover has challenged deer (in the north). I expected a decline (in big buck numbers there)."

Provencher said the drop in trophy deer forced the club to lower its standard for accepting trophy racks about four years ago. Rather than requiring the international Boone and Crockett Club score of 140, it went to a score of 135. In addition, the club did away with the deadline for submitting entries, Provencher said.

Still, there were not enough this year to justify a 2008 yearbook, he said.

"The big buck thing is real, and it's scary to me. Where is it going to go?" Provencher said. "Something drastic needs to be done. Hunters spend so much money chasing whitetails around the state. It just seems like it's going downhill."

But because the buck harvest in Maine has gone up overall, Kantar isn't worried.

According to Kantar, the average buck harvest was 12,500 in the mid-1980s. That went up to 16,000 from 1986 to 1990. In the late 1990s, the average jumped to 19,000.

From 2001 to 2005, the average buck harvest dropped slightly to an average of 17,270, but was still well above 1980 levels.

There are fewer big trophy bucks showing up in the MASTC records books, Kantar said, because of the drop in deer in northern Maine, where whitetail deer have traditionally been larger and living at the northern end of the species range in Aroostook County.

"We don't have the deer in northern Maine we used to have. It's a hard place to make a living," Kantar said.

In the northern third of the state in the 1970s, there were as many as eight to 10 deer per square mile compared to today, when there are just two deer per square mile, he said.

Kantar said forestry operations in the past 30 years have divided the land up north, marking the end to many traditional deer wintering areas – where the whitetails herd up to make it through the season of deep snow.

"There is less of every age and size and sex," he said. "There are less mature bucks, but ... there are very low deer numbers there."

This fall's deer harvest, which will be tallied after muzzleloading season ends Dec. 13, may show even fewer deer in northern Maine because of last winter's long snowy season.

Once again, that likely will mean far fewer trophy bucks taken in Maine.

"We monitor winter conditions for 20 weeks," Kantar said. "Last winter, before we started monitoring snow depth in December, there was snow on the ground. Every week for 20 weeks, they were yarded up across the state. They were confined for 140 days. That's crazy."

DEIRDRE FLEMING, Portland Press Herald, November 20, 2008


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