Posts Tagged ‘Moosehead Region Hunting Report’
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
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Moosehead Region Hunting Report • Categories: General
Posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 by Maine Sportsman
Although we have a cookbook for much of our work, occasionally you get to improvise. From time to time when freeze up is approaching in the fall, we have had to trap and transplant some beaver whose dam building threatens someone’s road use/access/leach field or what not. (Much of this work is now done by animal control “agents.”) To satisfy both trappers and other segments of the public we were, at that time, asked to deal with those situations without immediately dispatching the beavers. Somewhere I heard that some genius damage control agent had moved such nuisance beavers into old/dead flowages & provided them with a foodpile, in order that he could trap them again when the open season rolled around a few weeks later. Once when a landowner in Abbot wanted to “restore” a duck marsh, I tried it myself. And it worked. I checked the next spring, the beavers had stayed put. How much of a foodpile does a beaver need? Based on work done in Michigan, not much. A loose pile, 7 ft x 7 ft x 2 ft, should be enough for the whole winter for one. Popple, which is their favorite food, can be easily had. Beaver tend not to move when freezing temperatures approach. When ice forms they’re locked out.
Tags: Moosehead Region Hunting Report • Categories: General
Posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 by Maine Sportsman
Biologist’s do all kinds of unusual jobs; I remember when Dave Knupp walked the Realty Road (a major haul road for loggers up north) with a stick of bamboo and a mirror attached to the end. When asked by a trucker just what he was doing, he had a ready explanation, “Looking in robin’s nests.” He, or whoever he worked for, was trying to determine whether the gunk being sprayed to control spruce budworm had a detrimental effect on other life forms.
This year I find myself once again asking hunters whether they’d like to part with their deer head. We find mostly just the locals are willing. This creates a problem, because it makes it difficult for us to get enough from the area north of Greenville.
We will extract parts from the heads for testing for CWD (Chronic Wasting Disease); specifically the opex & retropharygeal lymph nodes. These will eventually be examined in a commercial lab. Results will be available next spring.
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Tags: Moosehead Region Hunting Report • Categories: General
Posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 by Maine Sportsman
Last spring I was out harvesting moose lungs again, this time on Toe-of-the -Boot. Say what? In recent years quite a few young moose have died of heavy tick infestations and/or lung worms, which is a rather new and very important development for moose “managers.” Those moose are generally approaching age 1. Bigger moose are much better able to handle tick loads. The speculation is that the tick populations grew following the build up of the moose population. If recruitment into the population of older animals is down, “allowable harvest,” as a percentage of the population at large, may be changing downward.
We need to investigate, but how? It is nigh impossible to get good information on the magnitude of this loss. And we aren’t sure whether the loss is constant or periodic. These moose tend to die in late winter when not many people are in the woods to notice and when getting around is difficult due to rutted and/or soft roads, high water, and patchy snow cover. Aerial composition counts which could be compared to herd composition counts done in the 80s are out because yearlings aren’t too readily distinguished from older animals. What to do?
NH has taken the approach of radio-equipping calf moose & monitoring their survival. Preliminary results don’t look good for the moose. We could follow suit except for the expense. And even then, it is doubtful sample size would be sufficiently large to be sure the rates obtained are representative. The only practical answer appears to be to follow trend information such as hunter success rates, reported sighting rates, incidence of road kill, and possibly age structure of the harvest.
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Tags: Moosehead Region Hunting Report • Categories: General
