Public Hearing Attendance Indicates Tremont Residents Possibly Pro Deer Hunt
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Acadia Psychiatry.
TREMONT—After months of discussions and brainstorming that initially began with a proposed state legislative action (LD1438) to allow deer hunting on Mount Desert Island, a majority of the people speaking at a Tremont Select Board meeting, July 7, seemed in favor of having a potential deer hunt in the island town.
Of the approximately 22 people that turned out for the Tremont Select Board’s public hearing on a potential deer hunt in Tremont, and spoke publicly, only two of those in attendance identified themselves as not being Tremont residents, both living in Southwest Harbor. Of those that spoke, only two spoke out as against a deer hunt and a third attendee said he was taking a neutral stance for now. The remainder of speakers gave the appearance of being pro deer hunt.
Based on previous select board meetings and consultation with representatives from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (IFW) the select board appears to be positioned to take on a long and arduous process of coming up with a hybrid hunt that is customized to the desires of the town while at the same time allowing for a safety valve that would allow the town to discontinue the hunt if they deemed that necessary.
At the July 7 meeting, Select Board Chair Jamie Thurlow said, “It’s going to take a lot of work to get through the details to get it where you want it for their approval.”
One audience member was at the meeting to gather information for the town where she resides, Southwest Harbor, which has also expressed concern over the growing size of the deer herd and the damage caused by deer.
“We are taking up and talking about the issue of deer as part of our agenda. We just want you to know at this point that we are seriously looking at it, there have been a number of discussions at our select board and among people in town about culling the herd in some fashion. It’s definitely an issue that many people care about,” Nancy Weingarten, chair of the Southwest Harbor Sustainability Committee said.
Nature photographer and Bass Harbor resident George Sanker said, “I moved here 13 years ago for one reason really; beside from the fact that it is a beautiful place, there is no hunting. I always pick national parks because in national parks and the great state parks the animals learn that they are protected; they learn that people aren’t going to hurt them, and you get to see things that you can’t see where they are hunted.”
While there is no hunting within Acadia National Park, the remainder of Mount Desert Island is open to all hunting, during legal hunting seasons, with the exception of deer.
TYPES OF POTENTIAL HUNTS
Alex Johnson of Seal Cove suggested having an archery-only hunt and seemed to be a fan of the state’s existing expanded archery hunt. During the expanded archery hunt a hunter can buy antlerless deer tags for $12 per tag. There is apparently no limit to how many anterless deer can be harvested during the expanded archery hunt because the rules say the limit is “multiple antlerless deer (with appropriate expanded archery permits).”
Johnson said that he regularly hunts during the expanded archery season on the outer islands, many of which are expanded archery season hunting zones.
For the Town of Tremont, one issue with opening the town to an expanded archery season is that this would fall under established state hunting rules and the town would lose the power to end the hunt. Ending an expanded archery hunting season would have to be done at the state level and could be quite difficult.
The select board has narrowed down the possible types of hunts to three potential options.
COMMONLY MENTIONED JUSTIFICATIONS FOR A HUNT
An unhealthy deer herd due to overpopulation, ticks and Lyme disease, destruction of property, and vehicle crashes involving deer are the most commonly stated reasons for reducing the deer population. With the exception of vehicle crashes, which were hardly mentioned, the same pattern was followed at the public hearing.
“I think that the herd population is unhealthy, it’s too big, it’s not sustainable. The herd can’t take care of itself, it’s too big, and that is not healthy,” Ellen Mitchell of Tremont said. “In every system, like everything, it has a natural way that it’s taken care of and when we are feeding them and making them pets and wanting so many of them it is just not healthy, for them, for us, for anyone.”
Lighthouse Road resident Dianne McMullan spoke to financial costs.
“We have so many deer in our yard, and I mean in our yard, not up the hill, right looking in our windows. I’ve had a deprivation permit since 2014 which means that my hunter can get two deer and then I have to call and get it renewed and maybe if I am lucky, get one more,” McMullan said. “I can’t tell you how much money we have spent trying to keep the deer out of our gardens. I am tired of it, I am exhausted, financially, physically, I don’t understand why people have to humanize the deer. They are beautiful and I love them but there are too many of them.”
Others said that perhaps the hunting should be done by professionals.
“Bow hunting, I think that if something like this has to be done, then it really should be done by sharpshooters, by people who are actually trained in doing this who don’t have a bloodlust to go out and do it. Bow and arrow, the chances of killing your deer with that bow and arrow are about 67%. So then what you’ve got, is you’ve got a bunch of deer that are wounded and bleeding out, and then you have your people with the bow and arrows who are following those trails and eventually getting them (the shot deer), maybe,” said Charlotte Gill, a Southwest Harbor resident.
Gill then suggested that maybe the answer is not killing the deer but other measures.
“I figure let’s start at the other end and maybe stop feeding them. I myself feed deer, and then again, I live next to the national park and I don’t have a problem with it,” Gill said. “I think a lot of concern seems to be about people’s gardens. So, I guess my point on the gardens is maybe make a better fence. We are in their backyard.”
According to the State of Maine, “Summer home ranges (area that an animal lives within) for deer in Maine are generally 500-600 acres but can vary from 150 to more than 2,000 acres. Movement by deer from summer to winter range can vary from less than a mile to more than 25 miles depending on availability and suitability of the winter range.”
So, if someone is feeding deer on their property, they are also potentially feeding all of the deer within at least a mile in every direction from that feed source.
An audience member asked if a deer hunting season is established in Tremont, would the feeding of deer then be able to be regulated.
The feeding of deer during the date range of June 1 - December 15 where deer hunting is allowed is actually baiting deer and is illegal in Maine.
“I don’t intentionally feed the deer, but I am feeding the deer because I buy plants, I plant things, I have trees in my yard and unless I live in a gravel pit, I am feeding the deer, as are we all,” said Nancy Sweeney of Bass Harbor. “Anyone who has lived here more than 15 or 20 years has seen the herd grow exponentially. So, I am wondering, if we do nothing now, in ten years what are we gonna have? We are going to have a serious serious problem on our hands.”
Both Gill and Sanker mentioned tick studies done on deer herd populations and they both stated that studies have been done where 75-80% of a deer herd’s population was culled and researchers discovered no change in the prevalence of Lyme disease.
Johnson responded to that by saying, “The deer and the ticks, yeah, they jump from critter to critter. Every deer that I pull out from the outer islands every year probably has 60-70 ticks on it. They are a feeding station and if we limited the amount of feeding stations, yes, they are going to go to other critters and stuff, but they don’t have a mobile blood tank to keep them up.”
“If there were hunting, I would agree with this gentleman that archery would be the only way to go. Half of this island is national park and the other half is very developed. The last thing that we need are bullets flying around the limited developed side of this island,” Sanker said.
Sanker said, “To me, even with archery, it’s an amazing thing as somebody who is interested in wildlife, it’s magic to see an animal trust you, accept your presence, and the only way to get great wildlife photography is when that happens, otherwise, yeah you might see a deer, a buck, and as soon as they see you, they are off and running. You don’t observe their personalities, they are all different, they have different emotions, they are individuals, and they get killed all over the country by hunters.”
Johnson, a hunter, said, “When I want to see nature at its best, I am sitting in a tree.”
“Yeah, me too,” Sanker the photographer yelled out in reply.
AUTOMOBILE CRASHES INVOLVING DEER
During the meeting, Sanker said people talk about automobile crashes involving deer all of the time and asked why can’t the speed limits just be lowered as a method of crash reduction? The short answer to that question is that the majority of roads in the Town of Tremont with a higher speed limit are roads where the speed limit is set by the state based on its speed limit criteria and not controlled by the town.
Below is a list of reported/reportable crashes for the Town of Tremont from 2005 through 2024. The first column shows the year, the second column shows the total amount of reported or reportable crashes and the third column shows how many of those involved deer.
2005-24-3
2006-15-1
2007-20-1
2008-18-1
2009-19-8
2010-15-1
2011-16-1
2012-13-5
2013-15-6
2014-10-1
2015-11-4
2016-18-3
2017-14-9
2018-18-8
2019-12-6
2020-11-3
2021-11-5
2022-14-10
2023-16-7
2024-20-15
The above data comes from the State of Maine.
SELECT BOARD MEMBER COMMENTS REGARDING A POTENTIAL HUNT
Both Eric Eaton and Howard Goodwin were absent from the July 7 meeting, but the remaining select board members had some comments regarding a potential hunt.
“The only way that I would vote for anything to be open would be a limited license group that we would choose and that would be led by someone who has a huge background in hunting or trapping here. They know where everybody lives. In my opinion that’s the only safe way to conduct a hunt in this town as it is populated now,” Thurlow said.
”I am at the point where I am having a hard time believing something doesn’t need to be done. I love the deer and I have actually been able to hand feed one. Probably about every five years, a deer bounces off of my vehicle,” member Kevin Buck said. “I am extremely concerned about people that don’t know the area wandering around with high powered weapons. Residents, people who know the area, that know where houses are, I don’t have nearly, I don’t have a concern with that. Open hunting season or unrestricted people running around with high powered weapons is not going to get my vote either. I think archery is a pretty good compromise.”
Vice Chair McKenzie Jewett said, “I don’t know, I have gone back and forth a hundred times. I don’t hate the expanded archery season, I think it needs some tweaking. I agree with you that we need to do it the safest way possible. I am not a fan of people from Bangor coming down here and running around with guns in my backyard.”
However, no matter what option is chosen to move forward with, Jewett noted that everyone will have to follow the current rules regarding how far away you have to be from dwellings and such.
All of the select board members agreed that whatever they choose there must be an end date for the hunt, meaning they can try it for a year or two, be able to reevaluate, and end the hunting if necessary.
Any potential hunting plan would have to go before the voters at town meeting to be approved and enacted.
The next meeting of the Tremont Select Board is scheduled for August 11, 2025, in the Harvey Kelly Meeting Room at the town office.
Clarification: The Bar Harbor Story has received multiple emails from George Sanker stating that he was misrepresented. We’ve expanded his quote from our recording and inserted that instead in hopes of further clarifying his statements.
Originally, we’d just quoted Sanker as saying that he believes archery hunting is amazing and similar to wildlife photography. We regret the error.
In addition, Sanker has made it clear that he is vehemently against any type of hunting in Tremont or anywhere (he was included in the count of two people against any hunting).
Sanker said via email, “I am vehemently against archery hunting but it is the better of 2 evils - bullets vs. arrows.”
Sanker has also said via email, “I am very anti-hunting, not just in connection with the issue in Tremont. I would never respond favorably to the pro hunting statements you are referring to. Never! And I didn’t.”
We’re also including the recordings below. In addition, we have included a link to the Town of Tremont’s recording of the meeting which has been posted to YouTube as they do with every select board meeting. All of this material has been shared with Sanker.
Tremont Select Board July 7 - track 1
Tremont Select Board July 7 - track 2
YouTube video
All photos unless noted: Shaun Farrar/BHS
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Allowing deer hunting on MDI would be dangerous. Only half the island is not national park and that is where almost all of our homes, schools, and businesses are located. I have seen how in places that are near the national park the deer spend a lot of time in the park and venture out to feed.
Would be better to reintroduce natural predators such as cougars and wolves.