Archive for November, 2007
Posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 by Maine Sportsman
Procrastination has always been my strong suit. I am truly a professional at it. November is a crazy busy month for all us IF&W biologists. This week’s Outdoor Report competes for time along with closing Swan Island for the winter and the collection of deer season biological samples. Add in personal chores such as raking leaves and replacing an old leaky toilet, yes, even the “honey do” list gets honorable mention here, and there is little time left for a rousing Outdoor Report. Yet my Sunday evening approach to this report has much more to do with waiting until the last minute than it does with too heavy a workload. Maybe I was just waiting for something to inspire me…pondering out of the ordinary topics rather than hurrying to the first fixation that landed in my lap.
I have had little time for hunting this season, but I have spent a lot of time walking in the woods. I consider that to be the best time for pondering…and observing. Like watching a chipmunk, cheeks filled, scurrying along lichen covered stonewalls. My grandfather from Caribou called chippys “short legged deer” because of the way they run with their tails in the air. I contemplate whether this nickname is commentary relating to his deer hunting experiences. While set in the momentary smile of my grandfather’s “short legged deer” reminiscence, I start to pay attention to the stonewall that this little deer was running on. Ah, I found my inspiration.
Throughout the history of agriculture in Maine, and New England for that matter, stonewalls played an essential role. Stonewalls were more than just the mere ornamentation that they serve today. Stonewalls were used as fencing, boundary lines and animal pounds. The period from 1775 – 1825 was known as the golden age of stonewall building.
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Tags: Central Maine Hunting Report • Categories: General
Posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 by Maine Sportsman
A few weeks ago, as I was leaving the voting booth on Election Day, an old friend stopped me to tell me about a piece of land his is donating to the local land trust. For several years now, he has made his property available to me for the annual Christmas Bird Count so I was very pleased to hear it will be permanently protected. Before leaving, he also mentioned that he had recently seen a rabbit on his property. Somewhat surprised by the report, I queried him, “A rabbit, are you sure it wasn’t a snowshoe hare?” No, he was positive, it was a cottontail. Freeport, although not considered a hotspot for New England cottontails, is on the northern edge of their range in Maine. The prospect of a Freeport population was exciting indeed. New England Cottontail populations have significantly declined in Maine, so much so that they were listed as a state endangered species this past September under the Maine Endangered Species Act, and are currently listed as a candidate threatened species with the US Fish and Wildlife Service under the Federal Endangered Species Act. New England cottontail numbers are believed to have dropped to only a few hundred individuals, and their range, which used to extend as far as Fryeburg, Lewiston, and Belfast, now includes only York and Cumberland Counties, 17% of its former range. The reasons for this decline are twofold, a shift in habitat through natural succession and loss of available remaining habitat from development and associated increased predation. New England Cottontails need brushy, early successional upland habitat. Given that their remaining range lies in the heart of southern Maine’s development activity, old fields, and shrub lands have been replaced by subdivisions, or have reverted to forest stands. Add to this loss of habitat, increased human activity and an increase of outdoor pets such as free roaming cats, and the future for New England cottontails can appear bleak.
For years, I operated a banding station at Gilsland Farm in Falmouth, and up until about two summers ago, we would see New England Cottontails almost every morning we banded. As much as I love birds, it’s hard not be smitten with a rabbit. I would often stop and watch as they fed on the edge of a shrub thicket, their ears perked up, whiskers twitching, all the while chewing a favored plant. Always very alert and rather jumpy; as soon as they caught wind of you, they would retreat back into the thicket where they would remain for the next few minutes, until they felt secure enough to slowly venture back to the edge of the grass. New England Cottontails, unlike Eastern Cottontail, are not likely to venture too far into the open. In fact, their preferred habitat is very dense thickets or shrubs, with as much as 50,000 stems per hectare. Here in Maine, we just have New England Cottontails, so the only species you might confuse them with is a snowshoe hare. New England Cottontails are a medium sized rabbit, 15-17 inches, with a dark brown to buff coat that has a slight black wash. The back edge of their ears is black, and they have a distinct black spot between their ears. Eastern Cottontails, the rabbit so commonly seen on lawns and pastures in southern New England, were introduced to the region by local hunting clubs and don’t occur in Maine. Snowshoe hares have much larger ears and hind feet, have brown fur in the summer, which turns white in the winter.
This winter, MDIWF and USFWS will be working together on a project to document New England Cottontails throughout southern Maine. We’ll be conducting tracking surveys after snowfall, looking for browsed areas, and collecting scat samples. Our efforts will focus on sites where there have been known occurrences of NEC in the past, primarily on lands currently in conservation ownership. In addition, we will be working with land trusts and willing landowners to try and document populations at new sites. We are currently looking for volunteers to help us survey about 75 parcels in York and Cumberland counties. In early winter we will be conducting training sessions for anyone interested in helping with this project. You don’t need tracking experience, or a background in biology; just a willingness to learn, a flexible schedule, and a pair of snowshoes would be helpful. To learn more about this project, volunteer, report a sighting, or if you have a property you would like to have surveyed, please email me at judy-camuso@maine.gov
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Tags: Southwestern Maine Hunting Report • Categories: General
Posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 by Maine Sportsman
The third week of deer season is upon us and here in the North Country the hunters start coming into the lodges and camps. It’s not like it use to be, when the first and second week of deer season had all motels, camps, and lodges full. Speaking to camp owners and motels around the Ashland and Portage areas, there seems to be very few hunters booking reservations the first and second week, but bookings are full for the third and forth week. Another good indicator on how much hunter effort is out there is to check the North Maine Woods gate receipts. The North Maine Woods are managed gates for industrial landowner into unorganized territory, and anyone going through these gates must fill out paperwork on where they are going and type of use. This information is quite interesting in indicating hunter effort throughout October and November. The receipts from the first and second week indicated very few hunters were entering the “Big Woods” for deer hunting, and now with Canadian hunters needing a Maine Registered Guide there should be even fewer hunters.
What seems to be the driving force that hunters are looking for up in these parts, is snow. Snow enables the hunter to direct their hunt to a location where there has been recent deer sign, primarily tracks, or deer beds. With pre-hunt populations only around 2-3 deer per square mile, hunters are looking for any advantage they can find in locating the game. By reading tracks in snow, at least the hunter knows they are hunting in a location where there has been deer recently, and their chances of observing a deer, and hopefully bagging a trophy buck, are considerable better then on dry ground. Snow also offers the hunter the ability to track, by moving slowly along recently laid tracks, where the hunter stalks his prey, to perhaps get close enough to view and harvest a trophy white-tailed deer. Out in the western part of the region there is presently 6-8 inches of snow on the high ground, and 3-4 inches at lower elevation while in the eastern part of the region only about 1 inch of snow.
Tags: Aroostook County Hunting Report • Categories: General
Posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 by Maine Sportsman
The second week of firearm season for our whitetails brought cooler temperatures and better hunting conditions. Check stations I chatted with were busy, but the second week usually tends to be a bit on the slower side. In talking to hunters as well as my own observations, good rutting sign seemed to be starting to show up more consistently as expected. Big buck hunters full of confidence have just been sitting back waiting for the third week to get underway. That’s when they get serious about hunting deer. The third week for all will be more active as the peak of the rut kicks in and deer begin to move more during the day, especially if cooler temperatures stay in place. However, as we all know, the big boys may still stay nocturnal.
Hunter effort this past week seemed to be up from last year during the second week at least in most places. I spoke with a few folks located in the northern portion of our Region, and it was their opinion that the hunters were not there in their usual abundance. With people worried about the economy, or gas prices specifically, it will be interesting to see how hunter effort plays out these last two weeks.
The Penobscot Region is participating with the ongoing statewide effort to collect Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) surveillance samples. The sampling is going pretty well this year; the portions of Wildlife Management Districts (WMDs) 4, 5, 9, 10, 14, 17 and 26 that lie within the Region have been completed. However, we still need your help in collecting samples from WMDs 11, 18 and 19. More specifically, we need samples from the towns of Brookton, Danforth, Haynesville, Carroll and Lagrange. If you harvest a deer from one of these towns and are interested in helping the Department with this sampling effort, please contact the Enfield Regional Office at (207) 732-4132. Your assistance with this effort will be greatly appreciated!
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Tags: Penobscot Valley Hunting Report • Categories: General
Posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 by Maine Sportsman
In recent years I have been called out quite a few times to investigate someone’s “wolf” sighting or discovery of “wolf tracks. These excursions have taken me to Sapling, Guilford, Dover, Alder Brook Twp, Beattie Twp, Greenville, Bowerbank, Lobster Twp, and T4-R17 WELS. Call me a skeptic; for a long time we figured wolves in ME were extinct. When I was called to these places, when I could draw a conclusion, I figured the tracks were left by coyotes (Not large enough to not be a coyote), but in one instance, it was a large hound, probably left in the woods by cat hunters. The scat was the deciding factor. There later was a wolf in Guilford that was later shot and determined definitively to be of captive origin. It had been neutered.
There have been other wolves here, one was shot by a bear hunter (who was fined) near Lost Pd in T 5-R16 WELS in the 1990s. That animal acted oddly for a wild wolf. It closely approached campers, as if it was accustomed to being around people, shortly before it found the bear bait.
Soon after that, partially full dog food bags were found in the vicinity of where another “wolf” was picked up.
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Tags: Moosehead Region Hunting Report • Categories: General
