Deer poke their heads up through tall grass and flowers in a meadow in Arrowsic in this 2008 photo. Pat Wellenbach/Associated Press

While it’s still turkey time and deer season is months away, we’re going to shift gears and look ahead – a little and a long way ahead – at a piece of pending legislation in the state house. If passed by the legislature and signed by the governor, the bill (“An Act To Preserve Deer Habitat”) is a long overdue remedy that could change deer hunting in Maine for the better.

First a little history. In 2011, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife prepared Maine’s Game Plan for Deer. It came largely as a result of public concern over low deer numbers, particularly in northern, eastern and western Maine, a situation that had grown steadily worse for nearly 20 years. The principle causes were predation, winter severity and a concurrent diminishing of deer wintering areas (DWAs), critical habitat for winter deer survival.

Back up further to the early 90s and IFW was still in the process of mapping and rating DWAs. The idea was to identify and protect habitat that represents a limiting factor for deer. Without sufficient quantity and quality of winter habitat, deer struggled to survive sometimes harsh winters and became easier prey, mostly for coyotes. The effort was good in theory but fell short in practice because most of the DWAs were on private land, where landowners were often resistant to restrictions that could represent a financial hardship; so the state backed off. Instead, they sought cooperative agreements that also proved positive in theory but largely failed in practice. Meanwhile the deer herd dwindled.

The bill represents a very viable and exciting alternative. Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine’s executive director David Trahan, the bill’s principal author said, “If we care about restoring deer to northern, eastern and western Maine, this is the most important policy change of our lifetime.”

The deer herd in southern half of the state, by contrast, is robust. Earlier this month, State Deer Biologist Nathan Bieber proposed a 40-percent increase in any-deer permits for this fall, most of those targeted for 11 hunting districts in central and southern Maine.

The legislation would establish preferential consideration of DWAs identified by IFW under the Land for Maine’s Future program, a principle funding source. Rather than burdening private landowners, the state would own the land. Further, the bill specifies that lands acquired for this purpose must be owned and managed by IFW. This represents a significant change as management authority would lie with an agency charged with wildlife management, rather than the Bureau of Parks and Lands, which manages for public access and timber production.

Owning the land alone is not enough. It must then be properly managed, and the bill would allow Land for Maine’s Future funds to be used for the development of management plans. Furthermore, the costs of purchase and planning could be eligible for matching funds from sources like the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act, which collects an 11-percent excise tax on sporting arms and ammunition, then apportions them to states on a formula basis for paying up to 75 percent of the cost-approved projects. That means a $500,000 Land for Maine’s Future bond could generate up to $1.5 million.

Other funding sources could include money from an existing dedicated predation fund, an existing deer management fund, license or permit fees and mitigation dollars from development projects.

Now retired, Gerry Lavigne was Maine’s deer biologist for 30 years, including much of the lean times. Reflecting on the past at a recent presentation announcing the bill, he noted, “The northern half of the state was once Maine’s deer capital. There were at least a million acres of deer wintering habitat in the 50s and 60s that sheltered deer, and over 2,000 deer yards.”

Those numbers have declined significantly.

“We’re stuck at 2 or 3% of the landscape in deer yards now, when what we really need is closer to 10%,” he said. “This proposal could be a game changer from what we’ve been looking at for the last 40 years.”

During a deer management plan update in 2000, Lavigne was asked to do a projection of what the deer harvest would look like if we could bring the population back to just 10 deer per square mile in the northern half of Maine.

“Considering a harvest designed to stabilize the population, we’d be looking at 45,000 deer harvested per year, a good portion of which would be from the northern half of the state, while the southern half still remains strong,” he said.

It won’t happen overnight, but things could be very different for future generations of Maine deer hunters, not to mention, guides, outfitters, lodging facilities and rural communities in general that depend on dollars from out of state and other parts of the state.