Morning Sentinel
OUTDOORS: North Maine Woods a working forest with plenty of opportunity
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BY TRAVIS BARRETT Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel 07/18/2009

OXBOW -- From the passenger seat, I feel the massive pickup truck's tires sliding across the slick dirt road.

Lee Kantar grips the wheel intently with two white-knuckled hands, his arms extended, his body braced against his seat as his foot pumps the brake pedal with some ferocity.

Just off the front bumper of the truck, hugging the left side of the narrow strip cutting through dense forest, a terrified cow moose is on the dead run.

Whoever said moose can't run swiftly has never had occasion to see one literally running for its life.

Seconds of elapsed time feel more like several minutes. After popping up virtually out of nowhere to our left, the cow is in lockstep unison with the truck -- heading in the same direction, either unwilling or unable to head back down the small hill from where she came.

Just as suddenly as she'd arrived, she darts across the front of the truck as Kantar avoids her and she makes her way to the safety of a partial clearing.

When the truck finally skids to a stop, Kantar throws it into reverse and we back up to where we saw her cross the road. Sheepishly, perhaps, she glares at us from behind the safety of a tree's bough. Her look doesn't last for long, though, as she jogs off into the thick woods never to be seen again.

"It all happened so fast, I never even got a good enough look to be able to say anything about her health or how she was doing," Lee said.

Kantar and I have come to the North Maine Woods to find moose. Kantar is the leading moose and deer biologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, and I am along for the ride to see what observations we can make about the moose population in the northwest corner of the state.

* * *

The North Maine Woods is more than 3.5 million acres of working forest, an accumulation of privately held land owned by more than two dozen logging companies and independent camp owners. The region extends from the northern tip of the state, southwest along the border with Quebec, east to nearly Baxter State Park and then north again.

Some of Maine's popular outdoor destinations are within the North Maine Woods, from Chesuncook and Chamberlain Lakes to the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.

But this is not truly a wilderness area, not with logging trucks whizzing along loaded with cargo on pothole-filled roads pelted by rain.

"You wouldn't take your vehicle there and just park it and go off and walk somewhere in the woods," Kantar said. "The concept of a working forest is a very important one. You can't say all bad, bad, bad about the North Maine Woods and the uses of it when it's a forest economy. Thank goodness it is a forest economy there, because it allows that place to be semi-wild."

It's the "semi" that makes the place so interesting.

There are 15 checkpoints there, the most popular of which are Telos, with a view of the Abol Trail up the summit of Mt. Katahdin, and the one near Caribou Lake. All of the checkpoints are managed by North Maine Woods, Inc., which sees itself as a three-pronged service.

"One of our responsibilities is to greet the public -- we're like the Wal-Mart greeter for people who have never been in an industrial working forest," said Al Cowperthwaite of North Maine Woods. "We also play a security role. By having checkpoints on access roads, we know who's on the roads, and that makes a big deterrent for theft of equipment and things like that.

"But we also host the public."

There are 500 elementary campsites in the North Maine Woods, utilized mostly by hunters and other sportsmen.

"Generally, it's fishing and hunting for sportsmen," Cowperthwaite said. "We have a few families that will come up, but usually it's just for hunting. The facilities are pretty rustic. People will come up because they have access to all of this land and all of these lakes, ponds and streams."

* * *

In more than eight hours in the truck touring the North Maine Woods from the Oxbow checkpoint to the one at Telos, Lee Kantar and I saw just three moose.

He was not surprised.

"Certainly in the month of July, moose are going to be operating when it's cooler out," Kantar said. "They're going to be attracted to aquatic areas where it serves many purposes. There's vegetation that provides a high quantity of feed and a quality of feed."

Cowperthwaite said he sees fewer and fewer moose at this time of year. The ones he does see, he said, are typically in the evening hours.

"They've moved into the ponds now. The aquatic vegetation is up there," Cowperthwaite said. "They've kind of moved off the roads."

But the moose -- even if unseen in the summer months -- are doing well in the North Maine Woods, in large part because it is a working landscape and not an untouched tract of land.

Kantar said that from a herd management point of view, forested land has a significant impact on populations of both moose and deer. There's a reason hunters are attracted the area each autumn.

"The reality is that it's heavily managed," Kantar said, noting changes that have taken place over the last 30 years, including lesser clear-cutting restrictions in the '80s and '90s that took out large swaths of mature growth. "Changes brought about in forest practices are what's going to dictate the wildlife that thrives there.

"That's not good, bad or indifferent, but it's a whole concept that is slightly lost to people. Moose and deer thrive on early stages of forest growth, early successional growth."

The kind of growth you only get when trees are taken out, and new ones are allowed to grow.

While overall use of the land is down, keeping it in line with national trends showing a decline in outdoor use, hunting has remained a steady use of the North Maine Woods.

With two harsh winters, bear hunting is on the rise, while deer hunting has dropped somewhat.

"Loggers are in the woods all year," Cowperthwaite said. "The area is open to the public (year-round). There's quite a lot of ice fishing that takes place... Deer hunting use to be a third of our annual yearly use, but due to changes in the population, that's dropped significantly. Bear hunting has become more popular, and the fishing is probably better than it used to be -- just because there are fewer fishermen here."

Things may change, but in the tradition of the outdoors, when they do, something always thrives.

"We have a landscape, a very large landscape that's changed over decades," Kantar said, "and it's going to (continue to) benefit some species over others."

Travis Barrett -- 621-5648

tbarrett@centralmaine.com

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