LIVERMORE – State wildlife biologist Chuck Hulsey of Strong hit the road Monday morning to do what he does twice a week during deer hunting season: Visit meat cutters to gather biological data from severed deer heads.

Without help from meat cutters statewide, biologists wouldn’t get information from thousands of deer to make regulatory recommendations to adjust doe harvest rates as needed for the following year.

They also wouldn’t get access to the 750 to 800 deer needed to monitor for signs of an infectious, incurable brain malady called chronic wasting disease, which can decimate herds.

Deer are “the one species where our biologists can collect almost all of the data we need that’s primarily involved in establishing harvest rates,” Hulsey said en route to RB’s Meats in Livermore.

“We would not be able to do this without voluntary meat-cutter efforts, so hunters need to thank them for allowing us to come into their facilities and fill out our locker-tag data.”

On a good day at Roger Roy’s Livermore meat-cutting business, Hulsey will examine 30 deer heads taken by Maine hunters and left to be processed.

On Monday – starting the season’s third week – he got 20, mostly bucks due to the reduction or elimination of any-deer – usually doe – permits this season in the area, the result of last winter’s severity.

Hulsey checks yearling bucks for antler beam diameters. Teeth amounts and size of molar wear in all deer help determine ages.

“The average beam diameter tells us whether the population is at the right level in terms of habitat, resource quality and the number of other deer on landscapes. We use yearling bucks, because they’re not a dominant animal,” he said.

Optimally, biologists want deer numbers in synchronization with available habitat.

“If a district is overpopulated, we will see yearling antler beam diameters go down, because there are not enough resources for antler growth. There may be too many deer. If so, we issue more any-deer permits,” Hulsey said.

If beam diameters are larger than average, there’s room for more deer.

“When you hunt a species where the harvest size is large and the hunter doesn’t have a lot of control over what deer he or she takes, then you can get good population data from samples,” he said.

Statewide, this enables biologists to see 15 percent of the whitetail population.

Like other wildlife biologists, Hulsey also collects select deer heads or, if hunters want heads for trophies, he surgically removes each deer’s two lymph nodes and spinal tissue.

Sample sizes must be a certain number per town, plantation or unorganized territory from within Hulsey’s district, which stretches from Bethel to Skowhegan to The Forks and Coburn Gore.

The samples are tested for chronic wasting disease, a protein that builds up on the brain like plaque, killing the animal slowly.

It hasn’t spread to Maine from New York, where it’s rare, or West Virginia, where it’s common.

Initially discovered in deer in the West, the disease didn’t alarm biologists in Maine and New England until seven or eight years ago when it began spreading, like when it suddenly jumped from Utah to Wisconsin, Hulsey said.

From now through the end of muzzleloading season, Hulsey would like hunters who kill deer in any plantation or unorganized territory, or in Andover, Kingfield, Moscow and New Sharon, to call him at 592-6255, so he can get samples.

“In the last two years in our region, my assistant, Bob Cordes and I, could get 100 percent of our CWD samples, but it will be tough this year because the winter was so hard on deer that there are fewer deer and not as many any-deer permits were issued. That means less hunter success,” Hulsey said.