My brother is an avid hunter. As for me, my deer harvest days are long gone but I do love bird season, the leaves and everything about October. In this day and age, many hunters complain, as my brother does, about the deer population in Aroostook County. So he got me thinking, if it’s as bad as he and others have said to me, maybe I can find some data to back up the rhetoric by these famous hunters.
I took the time to find he deer harvest data from 2005 and thought, I wonder how it compares to last year (2019)? Well, kick me in the pants! These boys are right! 2005 deer harvest show approx 499 deer harvested in District #151 and 2019 shows 292, a reduction of 209 deer or over 41%. How did this happen?
My guesses are, the deer yards are decimated, particularly in Allagash townships, deer are all over towns since their yards are gone. Very few hunters go into the hinterlands any longer when you can just wait for the deer to come to town (how depressing this is). The old days of seeing the big bucks from the lodges and most rural areas of our county seem to be gone. Whoever said our Inland Fisheries and Forest Management industry companies are great stewards of our lands and wildlife and do great work must be drinking some really bad kool-aid. The proof is in the numbers. Research it out yourself. Time to bring some sanity and balance back to our Great North Woods and its wildlife inhabitants… Vote Republican on November 3, and let’s get back our hunting reputation from days gone by. Even though the NRA endorses my opponent, we know how that works, don’t we?
