Maine outdoor reporter Steve Carpenteri has written an eye opening three-part series in the Northwoods Sporting Journal about Maine’s Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs), which are owned by the people of Maine and managed by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (MDIF&W).

In his report, Carpenteri has cultivated a simple, straightforward theme: Maine’s 61 WMAs, comprising more than 100,000 acres are not being managed the way they were intended to be. More specifically, Carpenteri asserts that the WMAs are, by law, supposed to be managed for wildife habitat that directly benefits hunters.

This is a pretty strong charge, but he backs it up with facts and even a quote or two from MDIF&W officials themselves!

Here is how it is supposed to work.

When you buy guns, ammo or bows and arrows anywhere in the country, there is a special federal tax  levied under the Pittman-Robertson Act. These federal tax dollars are then parceled out to the states on a formula related to the number of hunting license sales in a given state. In turn, this money is by law supposed to be used for improving wildlife habitat in a way that benefits those who paid the bill: American hunters. Carpenteri  says that in Maine, and most other states, the money is coming in but not being used properly.

To directly benefit hunters, the money would underwrite the cost of improving habitat in the WMAs for wild game. This would mean one thing: the use of  chain saws and bush hogs to create successional growth and forage, as well as nesting areas for game and birds. Carpenteri writes: “Maine’s land managers cut, mow or otherwise manipulate only about 1 percent of those 95,000 acres annually. The majority of our state WMA acreage has matured into climax (i.e., wildlife-empty) forestland in a slow process of unchecked growth that began when most of those lands were first acquired during the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, some 80 percent of those acres have not been manipulated by a chain saw or bush hog in over 70 years.”

In 2010 Maine received $4.5 million in Pittman-Robertson funding. So where does all of this money go?

“Salaries and operating  costs,” said John Boland, a supervising biologist with MDIF&W. Boland notes that about half of the WMA acreage are wetland areas that don’t lend themselves to logging and other forms of habitat manipulation. Still, that leaves 50,000 acres or so that sit idle with no habitat improvement to speak of.

Predictably, a USFWS official admitted that logging on federal or state land (creating successional growth for wildlife) often isn’t being done for public relations reasons ( read political correctness).

It gets worse. Reports Carpenteri, “Many programs presently underway on WMAs and designated as “wildlife habitat improvement” projects (more semantics) are designed to provide habitat for species that are illegal to hunt. For example, I recently visited a 65-acre clear-cut on the 5,000-acre Vernon Walker WMA in Newfield that is designed to create and improve habitat for moths and butterflies – neither of which may be hunted.”

So once again hunters are getting the short end of the stick. Money they spend on licenses and taxes is going everywhere else EXCEPT to manage wild game and wild game habitat.

Another head-shaking irony is that, while MDIF&W holds private forestland owners accountable for not protecting deer habitat, the Department itself apparently does not steward game habitat on the large parcels of forest that it directly controls.

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The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WQVM-FM  101.3) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected] and his new book is “A Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook.”