Sunday, Orange Sunday? The Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine flexes its political muscle again, most likely to its disadvantage BY ALEX IRVINE

Kilt Andrew doesn’t hunt. His wife not only doesn’t hunt, but is against hunting on principle. Still, he’s been coming to the piece of land he now owns on the flanks of Douglas Mountain since 1947, when it belonged to the Deering High School ski club, and, from the time he inherited the land from his father, Andrews has always allowed hunters access to it. From his perspective, that decision is part of a "landowning ethic" that includes allowing traditional uses such as hunting.

"Once you have a piece of land, what do you do with it?" he asks as we duck under the chain that crosses the access road at the boundary of his property. We walk up the road, and he points out places where he’s cleared out dead timber after the ’98 ice storm; at a clearing a hundred yards or so up the hill, he stops to talk about how he’s trying to improve the existing forest by clearing out the beech trees and some of the red-leaf maples, allowing white pines more room to grow. The few inches of fresh snow on the road are crisscrossed with squirrel and coyote tracks.

Andrew is an active member of the Small Woodland Owners Association of Maine, or SWOAM, an organization that exists to provide a unified voice for the thousands of people in Maine who own parcels of a few dozen or a few hundred acres of land. The organization, led by executive director Tom Doak, provides its members with information about sustainable practices and other issues impacting small woodlots; one of those issues is hunting access, and when Governor Baldacci proposed allowing Sunday hunting as part of the state’s new budget without consulting SWOAM, Doak and many of his members hit the roof. In a joint press release with the Maine Farm Bureau, SWOAM expressed "shock and disappointment" that the governor had proposed this change without consulting "the people most affected by the proposal," i.e. the small private landowners on whose property a large portion of Maine hunting takes place.

Why propose Sunday hunting in the first place? In 2003 testimony before the Legislature, Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine (SAM) executive director George Smith claimed that Sunday hunting "could bring as much as $3 million in new funding" to the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (DIF&W), which is entirely funded by license revenue and has therefore acted as SAM’s political arm on all legislative and regulatory issues related to hunting and fishing. SAM, you’ll remember, also claimed that the northern Maine economy would lose at least $42 million a year if the bear-baiting ban was passed; close examination of this claim revealed that the organization and USM professor Charlie Colgan had interviewed 90 hunters and asked them to guess how much they spent when they went bear hunting. It wasn’t good statistics, but it was great PR; the bear-baiting ban went down to defeat, helped along its way by DIF&W’s ethically questionable use of taxpayer dollars to oppose it.

SAM appears to have scored another political victory, at least for now. Maine, claims Smith in legislative testimony (when he isn’t peddling tearjerker stories about the hardships imposed on hunters who can only go out on six of the week’s seven days), has to compete with neighboring states that allow Sunday hunting. Even though Baldacci’s proposal excludes firearm deer season, which according to DIF&W accounts for 80 percent of all hunting licenses sold in Maine, Smith argues that allowing Sunday hunting will draw in some vast untapped pool of hunters who aren’t going to Maine.

And SAM’s political branch agrees. DIF&W’s Mark Latti told the Portland Press Herald on January 13 that "We do lose people to New Hampshire and Vermont." He went on to say that allowing Sunday hunting would increase license sales.

As it happens, there’s a useful case study available for purposes of examining this claim. In May 2003, Maryland passed a law allowing Sunday hunting in the western half of the state on two of the most popular days in the year’s hunting calendar: the first Sunday of firearm deer season and the first Sunday of archery deer season. Paul Peditto, Director of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ Wildlife and Heritage Service, was instrumental in getting Sunday hunting passed against fierce opposition. His argument? Tradition plus market share. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia don’t allow Sunday hunting, and Peditto claimed that if Maryland allowed Sunday deer hunting, the forests beyond the Cumberland Gap would fill up with hunters from neighboring states on those two Sundays.

Now, after two years of Sunday deer hunting in Maryland, the numbers are in, and even Peditto admits that things haven’t turned out the way he’d hoped. Maryland’s total license sales moved approximately one percent, from about 97,000 in 2002 to about 98,000 last year — a difference that falls well within normal year-to-year fluctuation.

And what about out-of-state licenses? "Nonresident license sales have remained relatively stable," Peditto says. In other words, even though western Maryland lies within a three-hour drive of more than 10 million people in states that ban Sunday hunting, Maryland’s initiative didn’t improve the state’s market share.

What did happen was 3000 deer were taken on that first Sunday of firearm season, but overall harvest totals were down slightly from 2002, the last year before Sunday hunting. It would seem that a lot of people went hunting in Maryland on their two available Sundays, but the vast majority of them were people who would have gone hunting anyway. Although hunting-license sales were relatively unchanged, Peditto says, "there’s no question that it had an impact on hunter participation."

Well, fine, the reader is saying, but that was only two Sundays. Maine’s proposal is different, allowing hunters to go out every Sunday of the year and take whatever happens to be legal at the time. Surely this will draw people to the state who would otherwise stay home.

There are two ways to look at this. The first derives from George Smith’s own claim that 170,000 of the 210,000 or so licenses sold in Maine every year are for deer hunting. If that’s true, then the majority of Maine hunters won’t be affected by this — and how many people are going to travel from Vermont to Maine so they can shoot coyotes or porcupines? (Turkeys, maybe, since DIF&W is proposing an open season on what was almost our national bird.)

On January 7, at SAM’s annual Congress at the Augusta Elks Club, Governor Baldacci said that Maine attracts "over 40,000 nonresident hunters a year, but lose[s] many to neighboring states like Vermont, New Hampshire, and Canadian provinces where hunting is allowed on Sunday."

Refining those statistics a little, your correspondent contacted wildlife officials in Vermont and New Hampshire to get an idea of how their numbers stacked up against Maine’s. The results don’t quite square with the public pronouncements of Baldacci, Latti, and Smith.

In 2002, Maine sold 212,794 hunting licenses; 41,581, or 19.5 percent, of those went to out-of-state hunters. This nonresident number was the highest since 1992, and the total number of licenses sold in Maine has been pretty stable since 1995.

In 2002, New Hampshire sold 117,278 hunting licenses; 22,071, or 18.8 percent, of those went to out-of-state hunters. This nonresident number was down from 21 percent in 2000, and total license sales were off nearly 20 percent from 2000 levels.

In 2002, Vermont sold 92,393 hunting licenses; 14,230, or 15.4 percent, went to out-of-state hunters. This nonresident number was down from 17.6 percent in 2000, and total license sales were off almost 10 percent from 2000 levels.