DIF&W’s Sandy Ritchie, who has been selected to lead the department’s effort to rebuild the state’s deer herd, presented the legislature’s Fish and Wildlife Committee with a new 40-page Deer Action Plan this afternoon along with a briefing on the plan.
“There’s no question deer populations in central and northern Maine are very low,” Ritchie reported, noting that deer populations have been going down since the 1960s. She cited severe winters, predation by bears and coyotes, illegal hunting, and improper deer feeding as the reasons.
Ritchie said the new plan builds on the department’s existing deer management plan, the recommendations of their Deer Working and Deer Predation Working Group, and Senator David Trahan’s December workshop and subsequent Deer Action Plan.
For the record, I organized that workshop for Senator Trahan and wrote that Deer Plan. You can read that plan in the archives of this blog..
DIF&W’s new plan contains five elements necessary to increase deer “in this part of the state,” said Ritchie. “And at Senator Trahan’s request, we’ve identified anticipated costs for each element. This is not something we can do with our existing budget,” she emphasized.
“We’re refocusing and intensifying” existing projects and strategies, said Ritchie. “Each element is critical.”
Here’s how Ritchie described the five elements (I’ve paraphrased her remarks except for those in quotation marks).
1) Deer wintering areas and winter severity. We need to promote current use tax programs, and work with the legislature, landowners, sportsmen’s groups, to look at other incentives to encourage landowners to manage habitat.
2) Deer population management. We’re talking about doe population management. We need to update our data and model, better understand interactions between deer, habitat, predation, and moose management impacts on deer, and work with landowners who are feeding deer – especially where deer are killed crossing roads. We want to target illegal killing of deer (estimates 50 percent of legal kill is taken by poaching) and maybe increase poaching penalties.
3) Predation – coyotes and bear. “This is the big one everyone’s talking about.” We haven’t had funding since early 2000s to put together a targeted and sustained predation control program. We’re looking for “General Funds.” We’re looking at bear population goals and asking, “How can hunting and trapping stabilize the bear population.” There is no interest in reducing bear populations. We’ve got to ratchet up our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service incidental take permit application for trapping and push forward to get the permit. “The big thing about predation is it needs to be targeted, focused, and most importantly, sustained.” Snaring is prohibited by court consent decree. “Some of the tools are no longer available.”
4) Deer planning and public involvement. The current goals in northern part WMDs 1-11 are 8 to 10 deer per square mile. Those goals will remain although, “We’re obviously well below those levels.” These strategies will try to increase deer numbers until 2015 when the goals are revisited.
5) Information and outreach. “I think we’ve done a very good job of managing deer but could do more to inform the public about what we’re doing. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. We’ve got to do a better job of informing them about what we are doing and the progress we’re making in increasing deer numbers. We’ve also got to inform people of what they can do to help.”
“I assure you that increasing the deer population in central, northern, and eastern areas is very important to Governor LePage and the department,” concluded Ritchie. “This is going to be very difficult. We’re going to have to really work with landowners on the cooperative management of deer habitat. This is a great opportunity to forge new partnerships. The Fish and Wildlife Department can’t do it alone,” she said.
Rep. Stacy Guerin asked Ritchie why biologists haven’t been pulled off other species to work on deer. Sandy said that some biologists are paid with dedicated funds that don’t allow this. “We actually have many biologists working on deer,” she said, including 17 regional wildlife biologists. “There is certainly some reallocation of staff and resources we can do,” she acknowledged, but expressed the opinion that her department can’t take staff away from species like moose, even though moose are “slightly less important than deer”.
Rep. Mike Shaw probed the bear predation question. Sandy reported that the department’s Deer Predation Working Group recommended that her agency do nothing about bear, including a spring hunt or any increase in harvest other than through the seasons we have now, because of the bear’s importance to the economy.
Ritchie also said her agency is redoing its website and will have a section devoted to this plan. She said agency staff will also be making presentations on the plan at upcoming sportsmen’s shows, club meetings, and elsewhere.
Ritchie recently began issuing weekly reports on the department’s deer projects and is expected to continue to do that.
PHOTO: DIF&W’s Sandy Ritchie with Senator Dave Trahan.
