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wow deer get this old

Received an interesting e-mail from a friend regarding deer age in Maine. These numbers came from random survey at deer cutting facilities by bioligists from Maine IFW in 2018 harvest by age report.

Approx inventory 4000 deer of the over 33,000 harvested or 12% 8 year old 81 9 year old 66 10 year old 40 11 year old 35 12 year old 40 13 year old 24 14 year old 14 15 year old 13 16 year old 7 17 year old 2

Do the math at 12% survey and they kill some old deer. Also remember Maine is a "if it's brown its down" state with very few deer in the northern part of the state

Those deer must have no teeth left, then again neither do people from Maine. Sorry, couldn’t resist

That`s cold blooded...lol I find those figures very hard to believe out of that small of a sample group. Especially in a environment like Maine. Sorry but I call BS.

That REALLY surprises me I would have guessed a few 4-1/2 and virtually none older

maybe I'm not reading the information correctly, but Im doubting those numbers as I'm reading... 15,16,17 year old deer.... and multiples at that... Id believe one or two maybe, but that many... Maybe I'm just use to PA deer, where a 5 yr old is old.......

Yeah I’m not buying it

can we get a link to the study?

Maybe this?

However many points it has is how old the buck is right?????

Ooooooooooooooohh.

See AH link above and click on age and year

17 yo deer. Must be kinda tender that old. Or just skin n bone. There's alot of land without a lot of people in Maine, so if deer truly can get that old, I'd say that's the place they can do it, in those remote forests.

Yeah, I call BS on that too, for this reason if no other. Dr. mMickey Hellickson submitted several jawbones as well as incisors to have them aged by biologists and also by the cementum annuli method. Thing is, the deer had all been tagged as fawns and were of a known age. The upshot was that jawbone aging was just over 50% accurate and the cementum annuli was just over 60% accurate. So.....to me, deer age breaks down to what you see on the hoof. Yearling, immature, or mature. Those classes are easy to judge on the hoof and really all that’s needed to judge a shooter.

Agree with everyone calling BS. Especially at those numbers. I’d also like to know the process used for aging.

Drycreek is correct. Aging by tooth wear and replacement is less accurate the older a deer gets. So to is cementum annuli aging. Some studies indicate, especially for southern whitetails, that a deer can have two annuli per year. Environmental conditions are the culprit-drought and severe winter.

Deer in captivity 20 is not uncommon and also does will bare fawns into their late teens and 20's. In the Maine results it says estimates so probably not accurate but whitetails do live a lot longer than folks think. Shawn

Maybe these deer were on some sort of abrasive diet lol

I have a friend whom has been seeing the same piebald doe for 18 years

This is funny that it was brought up. So my buddy shot a buck in maine last year and he was bragging to me that the biologist at the check station told him the deer was 9 or 10 years old. It looked like a 4 1/2 yo buck to me. Definitely not 10 years old. I think the biologist need to go back to school or something.

Heres a pic. You guys tell me if this buck is 10 years old.

Drycreek knows what's up....

The math works out to .08 percent of the deer surveyed were 8 year old or older when killed. That means less than one deer in one hundred that is harvested is over eight years old. That sounds like a reasonable amount of deer surviving to their golden years to me.

I had one doe that I was able to keep track of for 14 years. As a fawn something happened to her right ear and it was bent in half and stayed that way her whole life. She usually always had twins but at 7, 8,and 9 she had triplets, at 10 she had quads but 1 ended up dying. 11 was the last year she had any that I know of and it was just 1. At the time I hunted a big section by myself and the surrounding properties were very lightly hunted as well. When she was 9 or 10 I asked some of the other hunters in the area if they would not shoot her because I wanted to see how old she would get. I thought 2016 was gonna be her last because she looked pretty skinny and was always behind the other deer. I was surprised to see her in 2017 looking very healthy but that was the last year I ever seen her. Not sure if she died of old age or what but she never made it to the 2018 season.

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