Maine And Vermont Right Next Door, Yet Worlds Apart With Deer Management

Maine is tucked up into the far northeast corner of the United States. On its southern boarder is the Atlantic Ocean. Her eastern boarder touches with New Brunswick, Canada and to the north and northwest, Quebec, Canada. About the only boarder of the state that mimics a straight line of any kind is the western boarder that looks over into the state of New Hampshire.

Vermont is not very far away at all. At its farthest reaches of the Northeast Kingdom, the state is separated from Maine by perhaps only 25 miles of New Hampshire. Down south, the distance between Maine and Vermont at its widest point might stretch to 85 miles.

If you look at the map I provided, I drew a straight orange line across the northern boarder of Vermont, eastward into and across Maine. Mind you this line does not follow any longitudinal boundaries but is only for comparisons of geographic regions.

The reason for this is so that you can see that Maine and Vermont are not very far apart and that the southern part of the state of Maine appears to compare somewhat geographically with the entire state of Vermont. But does it?

For those who have been following, Maine just recently made public a report from the Northern and Eastern Maine Deer Task Force, a group commissioned to study why there are so few deer in northern and eastern Maine and what can be done about it.

Unfortunately for Maine deer hunters, this past winter was a bad one. Lots of snow that came early and often, piling the white stuff in excess of 200 inches in some locals. The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife is rating this years winter severity as high as 14% above what would be considered normal - that would be Wildlife Management District #1.

Consequently, MDIFW Commissioner Roland “Dan” Martin announced last week that Any-Deer Permits were going to be cut drastically for the 2008 deer hunting season. Maine, like several other states, uses the issuance of doe permits or in Maine, Any-Deer Permits, as perhaps the most important tool to regulate the deer populations to meet management target goals.

In the Department’s Agency Rulemaking Proposal, Commissioner Martin outlines his recommendation that 51,125 Any Deer Permits be made available to hunters this season in 13 of the state’s 29 Wildlife Management Districts, a decrease of 15,150 permits from last year and a reduction of seven management districts that were open to Antlerless Deer Permit holders last year.

While this is all taking place in Maine, only a stone’s throw to the west is Vermont, who also in an announcement last week, said they are going to double antlerless permits because they have far too many deer in most locations. Not only are they going to double the antlerless deer permits, they are also going to up the bag limit from two to three deer. How can this be? How can Maine have such a devastating winter that is going to result in slashing antlerless permits in virtually every Wildlife Management District and yet Vermont is looking to double theirs AND up the bag limit?

I grew up in Western Maine only 10 miles from the New Hampshire boarder and about 50 miles from Vermont. I am quite familiar with a lot of the geographic differences and I can tell you that at times winters in Maine and Vermont can be quite dissimilar.

Getting back to the line I drew on the map, everything in Maine north of that orange line is like no-man’s land. Heavily forested with mostly harsh to extreme winter weather every season. It was the southern districts of Maine that I wondered how different it can be than Vermont.

I fired off an email to Lee Kantar, deer specialist and wildlife biologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. I gave him a link to the story about Vermont doubling permits and asked how much different can it be between Maine and Vermont? I have great respect for Lee and all the biologists at MDIFW. They work hard and do a remarkable job considering their limitations through budgets and the pressures of politics that are always a threat to good science.

Lee admitted he wasn’t well versed on Vermont’s deer management programs but did share some thoughts on the differences in geography.

Vermont does have a substantially different geography. They are about 75% forested and 25% of the land base is in agricultural - that is 1.5 million of 6 million+ acres. Maine with all its land has about 1.25 million ag acres and a lot more forest. That in general is a much different dynamic for Vermont’s deer. The Green Mountains run up the spine of the state and is national forest land, that in combination with their Act 250 law provides additional protections to their deer wintering areas that we do not have. They also have an overall milder climate.

Act 250, or the Land Use and Development Act, was created to better manage land use and growth in Vermont. One key aspect of Act 250 says, “provides habitat for breeding, feeding, resting, and shelter to both game and nongame species of wildlife.” This is also expanded out to say that you can’t put development into deer wintering yards.

Kantar shared a bit of information he received from some folks in Vermont about their winter.

It’s amazing how variable winter has been across the northeast. We’ve had a good bit of snow but also had major thaws in Dec., Jan., Feb., and March. Unless we have some late winter storms with deep snow persisting into April, we’ll be seeing our 4th generally mild winter in a row, excepting a few local lake-effect areas.

He says that Maine’s winter will no doubt go down in the history books as being in the top five in regards to wildlife mortality.

Kantar says that in Maine, each year they begin the process of trying to determine what has happened from the end of deer hunting season until now, to see what this is going to spell out for the deer herd statewide. They look at each Wildlife Management District separately through an entire host of available data.

When we start the management decision process for our any deer permitting it begins with a look at how each district has faired over the last 7 years, where our population is in respect to district goals and what does the balance of mortality and recruitment look like for each district. Has mortality and recruitment patterns changed over the last year?

This is a good time to point out that even though Commissioner Martin has announced plans to reduce Any-Deer Permits for next season, the projected cuts are very much subject to change. Many people don’t realize that parts of Maine are in a very critical time for deer to be able to survive the winter. A long, prolonged winter season, delaying green up and weather that is difficult on fawns that will be born, will determine how many fawns live and also the nearly starved deer, whether they will pull through or not.

Maine has 28 winter severity monitoring systems. With this data and data collected over the past years, biologists will calculate out a winter mortality rate, all based on historic and current events collected in their data. Kantar points out the winter severity will vary all across the state. For those of us who live or have lived there, we know that weather in Fort Kent can certainly be completely different in Dover-Foxcroft, Eastport or Bridgton.

Once a mortality rate for this year has been calculated, it is compared with the 15-year mean.

This means how does this year compare with the average winter. Is mortality above and beyond “normal”? In the 07-08 preliminary analysis we see that winter severity and therefore mortality was above normal across the state. In WMD 24 along the coast it was as little as 2% above the norm, while in WMD 1 it was estimated at 14% above the norm.

From here biologists must then figure out how to make adjustments to the allotment of Any-Deer Permits to compensate for calculated losses in order to stay within the management plan for each WMD. Obviously, the higher the winter mortality, the greater the compensation - meaning fewer Any-Deer Permits issued. These of course will vary WMD to WMD depending on whether each district’s plan is seeking to reduce, maintain or increase deer numbers.

If this sounds complicated, it’s not. This is the simplified version of deer management and the utilization of the Winter Severity Index calculations. Deer management is complicated, using factors some of us have never heard of, say nothing about understand.

Mr. Kantar answered my questions in a more than satisfactory manner but I still had a couple more questions that I wanted to get answers for that also pertain to deer management and directly to the severe winters. He promised to get back to me but here is what I wanted to know.

I wanted to know how the management of predators, namely black bears and coyotes, are figured into deer mortality rates and the winter severity index. This is not something that can be easily answered. Hunters all across Maine are fed up with coyotes killing off the deer. Many, myself included, believe there are far too many coyotes in Maine and would like to see something done.

What I would like to know and pass on to readers is how biologists monitor coyote and black bear populations and the role they play in the winter mortality rate we’ve just been talking about.

The second question concerns how to explain to hunters about buck to doe ratios so that it is understood? I’ve written about this before but mostly I feel as though it is falling on deaf ears and those that refuse to believe that buck to doe ratios don’t become 1 buck in 100 does.

Kantar promised to take two Tylenol and call me in the morning.

Tom Remington