While deer season isn’t over yet, with a week remaining for muzzleloader and expanded archery hunters, it is a good time to look back on the 2024 season and look forward to 2025. As of Dec. 2 and the start of muzzleloader season, MDIFW’s Harvest Dashboard showed 40,155 whitetails had been registered. While it may not top 2022’s record of 43,787, it’s already above last year’s kill (38,215).

That’s the sign of a healthy herd, for which there are several contributing factors. One is several relatively mild winters. Prolonged periods of cold and deep snow all put added stress on deer at a time when food is least available and nutritious. Another related variable is consecutive bumper acorn crops. That gives deer a nutritional advantage even if this winter is more severe.

Management plans seem to be on track, at least as far as overall harvest numbers. However, with the new antlerless permit system only in its second year, it’s still too soon to tell if hunters are meeting the doe harvest objectives. Given the number of available permits that went unclaimed, they may not be.

That could be good or bad depending on your perspective. From a deer manager’s perspective, it means hunters aren’t maintaining deer populations at, or reducing them to target levels in southern and central Maine. However, those levels are often based on social rather than biological parameters – what the general public will tolerate vs. what the habitat can support. From a deer hunter’s perspective, it means more does producing more fawns so there will be more deer around next year.

The size and quality of deer taken this year and the hunters taking them were also impressive. Based largely posts to the Maine Deer Hunters Facebook group, there were a lot more big bucks, tipping the scales above 200 pounds. Even more encouraging, a lot of the deer harvested, both large and small, were taken by youth and female hunters. Various programs developed to recruit, retain and reactivate hunters seem to be working.

It will be interesting to see the age distribution of deer in the harvest, particularly antlered bucks. Maine has tended toward the low end in recent years, ranking first in the nation in terms of the proportion of yearling bucks in 2022. Educational efforts by IFW, an abundance of deer and a generally more informed hunting population seem to be showing positive results in terms of letting those yearlings get at least another year older, and bigger.

Perhaps best of all, it was another safe year for deer hunters and those they share the woods with. The hunting-related incidents reported were relatively minor and often self-inflicted (getting lost, falling out of treestands). Hunters seem to be behaving themselves as well. Sure, there are always a few outlaws but they’re in a declining minority. By all accounts, the recent past shows that the future looks very bright for Maine’s deer hunting tradition.

Bob Humphrey is a freelance writer and Registered Maine Guide who lives in Pownal. He can be reached at: bob@bobhumphrey.com