“How big was your buck?” A successful hunter often gets that question. The answer is usually, “He’s an 8-point,” or 6 or 10, or whatever. That satisfies the questioner, but it doesn’t say much about the buck. A 1½-year old 8-point is vastly different from a 5½-year old 8-point.

In Maine and New England, the answer is often given in weight. “200 pounds.” That conveys how much meat the deer produced, but it still doesn’t tell the whole story.

Age is another way we evaluate a deer. In the wild, deer can live as long as 20 years, but in this part of the country most bucks get killed at 2½ or 3½ years of age. It’s rare for a deer to reach true physical maturity, which happens at around 6 years. Until this year, the oldest buck I’ve taken was probably 4½ years old, but that’s just a guess.

Some things we think are age-related aren’t. For example, gray hair on a deer’s muzzle is not an indicator. My 16-year-old dog has a gray face, but only four years ago she had no gray hair at all. I don’t think any of the gray-faced deer I’ve seen were even close to 12 years old.

Few hunters are experts at judging age. Most lifelong hunters haven’t looked at many of the jawbones from the deer they have shot, and to become an expert a hunter must see far more deer than his own hunting career can show him. That means the everyday hunter is usually guessing.

The real experts are the taxidermists and biologists (and a few others) who examine dozens or even hundreds of deer per year. Still, they aren’t even close to 100% correct when they judge age.

I have the jawbones from four of the bigger bucks I’ve shot. The jaws from the buck I shot this year show he is clearly older than the other three, but how old? That would be a guess.

In 1949 biologist C.W. Severinghaus developed a model for determining a deer’s age based on the molars — how many they have and how worn they are. Up to age 1½, that method is very reliable because it’s based first on how many molars have erupted. When a deer is older than 1½, the method bases age on how much wear those molars have. The problem? Tooth wear varies greatly due to diet.

Judging by tooth wear is less reliable the older a deer gets. If a deer eats mostly green things, his teeth won’t wear much. Woody browse will cause his teeth to wear more. But if he paws into the ground and eats lots of roots, he will also chew lots of gritty dirt, so teeth will wear faster. Individual deer vary greatly in what they prefer, even in the same habitat.

According to a study by Montana Fish and Wildlife, tooth wear aging is only 43% accurate for white-tailed deer. But we now have a way of determining age that’s much more reliable than estimates based on tooth wear. It requires the examination of just one tooth, a lower central incisor. (Deer don’t have upper incisors.) If that tooth is extracted and sent to a lab, it will be cross-sectioned, stained, and studied under a microscope. It will have visible rings, similar to the rings on a tree, which will show how many years the deer has lived. That method is called cementum annuli analysis, and the same Montana study says it’s about 85% accurate.

This year’s buck had teeth that were much more worn than the teeth of any other deer I’ve shot. His jawbone showed signs of past infection. He was missing two of his eight front incisors. (Broken roots were still in the sockets.) He’s also missing his first premolars on both sides. His jawbones are more than an inch longer than the other jawbones I have, which means he is closer to full skeletal maturity. In body size, he field-dressed at 165 pounds (I’ve shot only two heavier than that), and his legs were visibly larger than the dainty legs of younger deer.

I’m going to stop guessing and have this year’s buck and one or two others aged by cementum annuli for the sake of comparison. I know of two companies that will do that (for a fee), and I’ll send teeth to one of those companies. In the meantime, I’m guessing this year’s buck was at least 5½, and probably 6½ — a fully mature buck. When the results come back, the guessing will be over.

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When “The Everyday Hunter” isn’t hunting, he’s thinking about hunting, talking about hunting, dreaming about hunting, writing about hunting, or wishing he were hunting. If you want to tell Steve exactly where your favorite hunting spot is, contact him through his website, www.EverydayHunter.com. He writes for top outdoor magazines, and won the 2015, 2018 and 2023 national “Pinnacle Award” for outdoor writing.