Deer hunting is a little like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and her choices of porridge. Instead of too hot, too cold or just right, we can have too many deer, too few deer or just enough. That’s a subjective and simplistic view, of course.

If deer are eating the ornamentals on the front lawn and rearranging the front end of your BMW, that’s a bad thing. If you don’t see any deer despite being soaked in doe urine, wearing ghillie-type camouflage (fluorescent orange also, please), and using bait (private property only) and an excellent tree stand, then there are too few deer. If deer were frequently wandering by your tree stand and you have a freezer full of steaks, that’s just right.

As Doug Hotton does it, there is a better, biological way to determine ideal deer population and health. Hotton, the Department of Natural Resources deer project leader, checks the deer health of harvested yearling bucks. Age is checked by tooth eruption/condition, using a Jaw Jack to open the recently deceased deer’s mouth.

Antler-beam diameter gives him data on the groceries deer are eating and their health. Too thin a deer antler and the deer are not eating enough to develop good racks.

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“We can also compare county-to-county,” Hotton said. Kent County always has larger deer — “more robust” populations, he said — than western counties.

Hotton was doing his measuring and calculating on the first day of the firearms season at Austin’s Deer Processing facility near Arundel Mills Mall. It’s something that he and his associates do throughout the state during early muzzleloading and firearms seasons.

“One year doesn’t give you data. We looks for trends, not blips,” said Hotton, noting that they have kept such records since the mid-1950s.

At Austin’s, deer were coming in by the pick-up load, field dressed and ready to be skinned, butchered and packaged for hunters.

Even with computers, the biological data will take awhile to process, but the overall results of the deer season look about the same as last year. Preliminary data shows that 44,066 deer were taken during the two-week firearms season, which is down about two percent from the official numbers of last year with 45,070 deer.

The breakdown of antlered/antlerless was about the same also. The antlered deer harvest was 16,085 (428 sika deer) this season compared with 16,098 (388 sika) last season. Antlerless deer declined a little more — 27,981 (480 sika) this year to 28,972 (492 sika) last year.

“The antlered deer harvest has remained relatively constant over the last five years, a strong indicator that the deer population has stabilized or declined in rural areas of the state,” Hotton explained.

I think that means that we are at the “just right” stage with deer. Just like Goldilocks’ choice of porridge.

C. Boyd Pfeiffer is an internationally known sportsman and award-winning writer on fishing, hunting, and the outdoors, and is currently working on his 25th book. He can be reached at cbpfeiffer@msn.com.