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Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Commissioner, Roland “Danny” Martin has responded to accusations made by George Smith, Executive Director for the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine and Maine Senator David Trahan, that lands owned by Gardner Land Company – acquired through the Baxter Land Swap in 2006 – had been illegally cut, destroying 350 acres of deer wintering habitat. According to Smith, the covenants placed on land in Maine’s T2R4 region, prohibited the harvesting of deer wintering habitat.

Backing up for just a moment, this all began with a debate taking place in the Pine Tree State over what has happened to the whitetail deer herd in Northern and Downeast Maine. George Smith, assuming under the direction of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, geared up his activism to see what could be done to address three things he lists as major contributors to the destruction of the deer herd: Two back to back severe winters, loss of deer wintering habitat and predators.

Through his work, Smith, along with Sen. Trahan, discovered that Gardner Land Company had harvested timber on a piece of land acquired through the Baxter Land Swap deal. According to Smith, this cutting, which he and others claim destroyed the deer yards, was done illegally.

Smith has written a few articles at his blogging media platform at Downeast Magazine online. His article, “Maine’s Deer Wintering Areas” published on January 22, 2010 is the one article that Commissioner Martin opted to respond to directly. Martin’s response can be found in the same Downeast online magazine here.

Much of Martin’s response is mostly tit for tat, which leaves me puzzled as to why he would respond publicly in this manner but I’m certainly not his personal manager. However, Martin does say that Gardner Land Company didn’t “improperly” harvest timber at T2R4.

Gardner never improperly cut lands on the five parcels traded in the Katahdin Lake acquisition project.

One of those “five parcels” is the T2R4 piece of which the debate is about. I guess the keyword Martin has chosen to use is “improperly”.

The tit for tat reveals itself more so when Martin accuses Smith of being “misleading” in his claims that the timber Gardner Land Company cut off, rendered the habitat useless for deer wintering, while Martin himself misleads readers by saying that the timber that was cut and the area around the harvest wasn’t any good for deer wintering to begin with.

That same area, according to studies done both before and after Gardner’s acquisition of the lands, failed to provide real opportunity for wintering, anyway.

Martin explains that Governor Baldacci requested that the lands (five parcels) be visited by professional foresters and wildlife biologists to assess the situation.

What they found was that none of the areas in question provided much in the way of quality wintering habitat to begin with, and none of the areas had been harvested in a way that detracted from their future potential as deer habitat.(emboldening is mine)

The group of professionals reported on March 2, 2010(?) that:

“None of the Habitat Management Areas (HMAs) that were transferred from the Bureau of Public Lands to the Gardner Land Company were high-value deer yards,”

Were they medium-value deer yards? Perhaps low-valued deer yards? From a fish and game commissioner whose department claims that the lack of global warming and loss of deer yards are the key blame factors for having no deer left, logic would tell us that destroying any quality deer winter habitat would be detrimental.

But perhaps the key statement Martin makes is this.

What IF&W found last month when it visited the five sites mentioned by Mr. Smith and Senator Trahan was that foresters had done nothing that IF&W wouldn’t have proposed on its own.

This information may appear to be helpful in getting to the bottom of this problem of Smith’s and Trahan’s accusations made against MDIFW, the DOC and Gardner Land Company, but it’s not.

Martin says Gardner didn’t cut any timber in T2R4 illegally. We only have Smith’s and Martin’s word as to exactly what the agreement was. Smith gives us a peek into the agreement,

Section Two, Part 6, of the legislative Resolve requires the Gardners to enter into “an agreement with the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to continue management of winter habitat for white-tailed deer on those lots that is consistent with the management agreement between DIF&W and the Department of Conservation in effect on March 30, 2006 and that the agreement will remain in effect as long as the grantee owns the lots.”

Again, this tells us nothing. This tells us that Gardner and IFW had to reach an agreement to continue managing deer yards, “consistent with the management agreement between DIF&W and the Department of Conservation”. So, what’s the agreement? Is the agreement such that Danny Martin can decide whether a winter deer yard in T2R4 can be cut because he sees it as not “high-value deer yards”? My guess is, yes!

Martin tells us Gardner didn’t do anything that IFW “wouldn’t have proposed on it’s own”. I find this statement concerning. While Martin never admits whether he knew or didn’t know that Gardner was going to harvest timber in T2R4, he claims they didn’t cut anything he wouldn’t have approved of. To me this is covering up for an after the fact event. Why didn’t Martin just come out and say, “I approved of Gardner Land Company to cut this timber”?

This is why Martin should never have responded in this fashion because he didn’t answer the important questions. There’s a lot more to this than his one simple claim that Gardner did not “improperly” cut timber.

Getting back to the issue of high-quality deer yards and poor-quality deer yards, I take issue. I’ve been in the woods more times than I could ever recall during the height of the winter and found deer holing up in some pretty low-quality habitat and I’ve seen them in some of the highest quality yards to be found anywhere. Do we now have a fish and game commissioner who advocates for protecting only high-quality yards and to hell with the rest?

Being that this fish and game department refuses to honestly address the predator issue, in my opinion, studies have shown that deer will stop migrating to their favorite deer yards when they know they are going to be harassed by coyotes and other predators. When this happens the deer will winter in people’s back yards if it’s safe from coyotes and offers any weather protection at all.

With such a conclusion then shouldn’t we be working to protect all qualities of deer yards?

So, what I want to know is this. Is the agreement supposedly worked out between Gardner and IFW specific about the protection of deer winter habitat? Or, is a decision to cut or not cut the responsibility of the commissioner?

Does the agreement require Gardner to contact Martin or somebody else prior to harvest and was this done?

If the decision rests with Martin as to whether Gardner could cut what we only know as not “high-quality” winter deer habitat, and it was his call to cut, we are left with questioning his judgment as a wildlife manager. I’m sorry but at the time Gardner did the cutting, only a fool with his head buried in the sand would not have known we had a deer crisis on our hands and to authorize the destruction of any deer yard, no matter the quality, would have been irresponsible.

Tom Remington

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