11:41 a.m. - The primary task on this opening weekend of the deer gun season was to collect deer heads as part of the state's ongoing effort to monitor chronic wasting disease.

Hunters could stop with their field dressed whole deer, then leave maybe five minutes later with the same deer, sans head.

Parked on the edge of the pavement on the north side of the Coffee Cup Fuel Stop in Steele, Randy Kreil and Greg Link had plenty of collateral duties to attend to as well.

Link, the state Game and Fish Department's assistant chief of the wild division, abandoned the saw and fillet knife he used to remove heads in favor of a scalpel. He wielded that tool to extract brain stems from the heads of several deer that game wardens had confiscated on the opening weekend of the deer gun season.

The heads were needed as evidence in pending cases. The brain stems were needed as part of the batch of samples to be sent off for CWD testing.

Meanwhile, Kreil, the NDGFD's chief of the wildlife division, was helping a motorist after smoke began floating out from under the car's hood during a refueling stop. Two quarts of oil later and a gas fill-up later, the motorist was back on the road.

Other folks stopped by merely to chat, whether about the deer opener or other hunting matters. A few even asked for PLOTS guides, the NDGFD booklet that pinpoints the private lands open to sportsmen parcels. Yep, Kreil and Link had copies to pass out.

The Steele check station was one of 13 dotted throughout the state on the opening weekend.

By Tuesday morning, Jacquie Ermer, the NDGFD biologist heading up the CWD monitoring effort, estimated that between 600 and 700 heads already had been collected.

The goal is 1,300 to 1,500 usable heads. Samples only are taken from deer older than a year and from deer taken in specific units.

Biologists and technicians started extracting brain stems, lymph nodes and tonsils from the heads on Tuesday and will continue today. Thursday is the Veterans Day holiday, but some folks will be picking up more heads in advance of next week's round of dissections.

Biologists and technicians are working at the Wildlife Services facility in northeast Bismarck this year instead of the NDGFD's lab.

"There's more elbow room," Ermer said.

The extra space will allow seven two-person teams to work at once, which should make the work go faster. Only five teams can do the work in the closer confines of the NDGFD lab.

"We like to share resources when we can," said Phil Mastrangelo, the state director for Wildlife Services.

Other heads still are en route to Bismarck.

"We will collect from meat processors through November," Ermer said, "And national wildlife refuges still need to be collected."

Although biologists opened the northern tier of the state for sampling, the goal this year is to finish up the surveillance units in the southern tier of the state.

The surveillance unit in the southwest, still was 200 heads short of the statistical goal before this year's opener. Two other units needed about 100 heads each.

A total sample of 458 animals must be tested per surveillance unit to detect 1 percent prevalence of CWD with 99 percent confidence, Ermer said. The state is divided into eight surveillance units, each of which encompasses several deer units.

Fatal to deer and elk, CWD has not been detected in North Dakota. There is no scientific evidence that CWD can be naturally transmitted to humans.

Once the samples are sent out for testing, the turnaround likely will take several months. If CWD is detected in deer, the hunter who harvested that deer will be notified. Otherwise, no news is good news.

By Saturday evening, the Steele crew had collected 42 heads, which they already dropped off in Bismarck.

And after spending much of their time talking to hunters and hearing anecdotal reports about the season, Kreil and Link were getting a snapshot of how the deer opener was unfolding.

One hunter killed a mule deer buck in the Pettibone-Robinson area, Kreil said.

"That's why some licenses say 'any antlered,'" he added.

Some hunters -- especially those with antlered licenses -- were passing on smaller bucks in hopes of hunting longer and finding a bigger buck before the gun season closes Nov. 21.

Others were using their extra licenses to good effect.

"Saturday night we had a big rush," Kreil said. "People were killing deer by the pickup load."

And many of those successful hunters were doing their hunting the old-fashioned way by putting one booted foot ahead of the other one.

Kreil estimated about 90 percent of hunters readily gave up their deer heads.

"At least a couple of hunters had real nice white-tailed or mule deer bucks and they wanted to mount those heads," Kreil said.

If a hunter wanted to keep the antlers, Link obligingly removed the skull cap holding the antlers before adding the head to the growing pile in the bed of a NDGFD pickup.

They finished up shortly after 8 o'clock on Sunday night with a 2 1/2-day total of 81 heads.

"It's a big step forward," Kreil said. "We probably will meet our objectives for that area."

(Reach reporter Richard Hinton at 250-8256 or outdoors@bismarcktribune.net.)