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Trend Signals Costly for Hunters

August 18, 2009 - AUGUSTA -- Recently at Barnes and Noble in Augusta, a quick perusal of deer-hunting magazines showed about 30 percent of the articles targeted three topics that these publications seldom mentioned 15 or certainly 20 years ago:

• Advice for planting forage crops on hunting land for attracting and holding deer in the area.

• Ideas for growing larger-antlered bucks.

• Tips for buying a large chunk of real estate for deer hunting.

In the latter category, articles included recommendations for a single hunter or a group purchasing or leasing land with ideal deer habitat and with potential for improvement.

A perfect property choice for a deer-hunting consortium would contain three essentials – food, water and shelter for whitetails. Ideally, any woodland for these animals must have edge habitat for growing nutritious forage.

Fields or large openings would also be crucial for planting crops. For natural foods, deer would require oak or beech groves for hard-mast, abandoned apple orchards and fungi for soft-mast, and small clear-cuts for herbaceous plants and rubus bushes, say raspberries or greenbriers.

Deer in states with severe winters would also need mature hemlock or cedar stands for shelter. Abundant water in all four seasons would prove crucial, too.

Twenty years ago, deer-hunting writers wrote about how to hunt and shoot as well as destination pieces. These days, readers feel a need to know more than just the basics.

This trend reflects an increasing population destroying wildlife habitat and decreasing hunting access at an alarming rate. In the last category, exurban development ranks as particularly pernicious because 5-acre house lots lining a woodland road block access to woods behind the dwellings.

Serious hunters realize they can no longer rely on landowners allowing unlimited access to a decreasing resource. Many deer enthusiasts feel a need to get into a lease or to buy land to insure their hunting future.

This squeeze has already started in the bottom third of Maine, but decades ago in states such as Texas and Kansas, just to name two, deer hunters had already reached a point where they faced five common choices if they wanted to pursue their sport:

• Own hunting land.

• Have relatives or friends who owned land.

• Buy into a lease.

• Pay a landowner to hunt, often big bucks to a well-organized Western ranch or Southern lodge that catered to hunters.

• Hunt on public property owned by federal, state or local governments.

In states such as Texas, the right to access land for hunting has turned into such a lucrative business that hunters may find that a relative or friend with land may not allow them to hunt. In 2009, it's nothing to pay $750 to $1,500 and more for a week's hunting.

At such prices, a landowner may no longer allow Uncle Joe a free hunt that would push out a paying customer.

Deer-hunting leases haven't taken off in Maine as they have in other states, leading to Allen's theory. This state may have large-bodied deer compared to other places, but the density of our whitetail herd falls far short compared to the rest of the country.

A scarce deer population makes hunters reluctant to make a major financial investment for hunting rights.

For example, please consider a quick digression: Leonard Lee Rue III, one of the world's more famous wildlife photographers, naturalists and respected hunters, once wrote that he wouldn't hunt an area with less than 50 deer per square mile, a rather typical standard for savvy hunters elsewhere.

According to our Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, northern and eastern Maine's whitetail population averages two per square mile, admittedly misleading.

In these regions, deer concentrate in small hot spots where populations may equal those in central and southern Maine, but just the same, two deer per square mile is two deer. Period.

Even in deer-rich central and southern Maine, in areas where hunting pressure culls the herd, the wildlife department claims that deer have risen to 30 deer per square mile, which gives deer-hunting landowners with those concentrations bragging rights.

However, 30 deer falls far short of Rue's rule.

If Maine follows the same path as most other states where hunting requires an investment, then it will push low-income folks out of the sport – a shame, but that's capitalism.

By looking at trends elsewhere, though, we're glimpsing the future, particularly if mild winters push our deer population up.

Yes, Maine has changed big time since I was a boy, and not everyone likes the threats to traditional values, but there you have it.

KEN ALLEN / ALLEN AFIELD Maine Outdoor Journal, Maine Media Today, 8/16/09


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