Maine deer harvest is 21,000 deer???? They have a 200k deer numbers and that is only a 10% harvest. No doubt the big boys are up there but man,, that is a lot of land for 200 k deer. I read a whole bunch on Maine deer hunting. Hunters say the woods is not logeed much due to bunny huggers. Real sad, I hear it is some real dandy country. I've only been as far as Speculator NY. , in the Adirondaks. Very rough beautiful country but seems really hard to hunt. I think you would be better in the Adirondaks than Maine. Not that I would know.
hookem: Yup that's the math...about a 10% success ratio and that is for ANY deer; for a buck it's much lower. If a guy wants to see a lot of deer, pick and choose bucks, Maine is not the place to go. Draw a line across northern Maine, NH, Vermont and the Adirondacks and the hunting is much the same....big, empty woods with low deer densities and "pockets" of deer activity.
Contemplating all this and experiencing it myself is why I consider the Benoits and others like them among the best deer hunters on the continent...they are consistently successful under these very difficult conditions, on bucks dressing 180 to over 250 pounds. But they are not the only one's.
Guys who live there, like JDK, who know the woods, work hard, and are good trackers and woodsmen(rare today)are successful more often than not...but these guys are not married to tree stands, are not "afraid" of getting lost, and understand that a big buck during rut will cover a lot of country, does not follow a "pattern", and know how to hunt them....they take off after them.
This is counterintuitive to someone used to stand hunting in areas of high deer densities, but it works. For example I would bet $10 bucks that JDK might well have killed that 260 pound buck that got bumped into another hunter(unusual up there and just bad luck) because it seems he had snow and a buck distracted by a hot doe....given enough time I bet he would have at least seen him at one point in time during the day.
Of course all this is a lot of work and over the top for someone new to the country. It's the reason I believe very strongly that deer hunting in northern Maine is tougher than anything else I have personally run into, continent wide. IME even central Canada is "easier".
