Sunday, Orange Sunday? (continued)

To recap:

In Maine, license sales are stable and the percentage of out-of-state purchases is growing; in Vermont and New Hampshire, license sales are dropping and the percentage of out-of-state purchases is also dropping. It would appear from these numbers that Sunday hunting or no Sunday hunting, Maine is doing a better job of attracting and retaining out-of-state hunters than either New Hampshire or Vermont.

Additionally, since states keep records on where their nonresident hunters come from, we can find out exactly how many Maine hunters have forsaken the Pine Tree State for the Sunday-hunting Elysian fields of Vermont and New Hampshire.

According to John Hall of Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources, Maine hunters account for an average of two percent of out-of-state licenses each year — not two percent of Vermont hunters, but two percent of the out-of-state segment. In an average year, that means about 300 Maine hunters bought a Vermont license, compared to 170,000 who stayed home. In New Hampshire, according to state license supervisor Susan Martin, the Maine percentage of out-of-state hunters is approximately 10 percent, or 2200.

Put those two numbers together, and you get about 2500 Maine hunters who visit our northern New England neighbors. Many of them also hunt in Maine, but let’s pretend they don’t. Let’s pretend that with Sunday hunting, every single hunter from Maine who hunts somewhere else stays home. The difference in the total number of licenses sold? One point two percent.

For this hypothetical and idealized 1.2 percent, plus some conjectured slice of the declining population of hunters in places like Massachusetts and Connecticut, SAM and DIF&W appear willing to sacrifice the good will of people like Kilt Andrew.

Andrew points out that, much like the rapidly transforming coast of Maine, the interior part of the state is seeing huge amounts of land change hands, often with loss of access resulting. "I think you see a correlation" between how long someone has owned a piece of land and how willing they are to permit traditional uses on it, Andrew says; the longer a parcel has been in the same hands, or the same family’s hands, the more likely it is that the owner will allow hunting. For him, it all tracks back to the landowning ethic.

"Especially in Southern Maine," he says, where public land is scarce and development pressures are so intense, small landowners like him provide the only places where people can enjoy the land, and Andrew allows hunting because according to his understanding of the landowning ethic, permitting local uses is part of what it means to own woodlands. It doesn’t make any sense to him that SWOAM, as representatives of more than five million acres of prime Maine hunting territory, went unconsulted in SAM’s Sunday initiative.

He also doesn’t have much patience for the emotional hunting-as-a-way-of-life argument that SAM hauls out whenever cameras are around. "Tradition," he snorts. "There are lots of traditions. Just because you do something doesn’t make it a tradition."

As a second-generation owner who isn’t a hunter himself, but who feels a responsibility to maintain his property as a resource for people like hunters who have always used it, Kilt Andrew is exactly the kind of ally Maine hunters should be cultivating. Instead their leadership has gone around him, and he thinks that an unintended consequence of Sunday hunting will be an increase in posting of private land.

Is that what he plans for his own property?

"I think not," Andrew says slowly. It’s a question, though, that "a lot of people are going to be asking themselves," he says, if the current proposal to allow Sunday hunting survives legislative scrutiny. Andrew believes in two prohibitions: Keep your engines off his land (it’s posted no ATVs and no snowmobiles), and leave him Sundays to enjoy his property — walk his dog, continue the war against the local beech trees, hike up to the top of the ridge and enjoy his view of the ocean — without having to worry, in his words, about "how woods-wise or sensible" any given group of hunters is going to be.

We look across Breakneck Brook, up the side of the mountain toward Andrew’s neighbors. They’ve recently posted their property against hunting, and back down Douglas Mountain Road he pointed out new houses every few hundred yards. On the way back down toward Sebago Lake, you don’t have to look hard to see no-trespassing notices stapled to trees.

SAM’s standard rhetorical package, usually following the part about hunting being a cherished tradition, includes trumpeting the effect hunting has on Maine’s economy, but here again a little context goes a long way. A 2001 US Fish and Wildlife Service study concluded that out-of-staters spent $42.3 million hunting in Maine in 2001; during the same year, flatlanders dropped $105.9 million to watch birds and hike. Rolling together both native Mainers and those from away, the numbers add up to $162.4 million for hunters and $345.9 million for "wildlife-watching." The Sunday-hunting initiative may or may not increase the hunting number, but it will almost certainly keep some people out of the woods on Sundays when they might have been spending money in local stores on their way to enjoy non-shooting uses of land like Kilt Andrew’s. The net result for the state is as likely as not to be a financial loss. But advocacy groups like the Appalachian Trail Conference and Maine Audubon, conscious of the power of the knee-jerk "tradition" argument, have so far remained silent.

Maine already sells more hunting licenses than New Hampshire and Vermont combined, and it’s the only state of the three whose out-of-state license revenues are increasing. If SAM’s proposal becomes law, a few more hunters might take to the woods in Maine (although given the example of Maryland, they might not), but one thing is certain: The state’s small landowners will have one more reason to kick hunters off their land for good.

Alex Irvine can be reached at airvine@phx.com