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TREMONT—The Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Advisory Council (IFW) approved the Town of Tremont’s special deer hunt today despite one member hoping for written assurances from the Maine Attorney General’s office that the move is legal.
Tremont will be the only town on Mount Desert Island where hunters can legally shoot deer.
The deer hunt begins November 2026 and runs for three seasons. Any deer killed in the town will not count toward the hunter’s state bag limit.
The IFW accepted written comments until July 30. It received 21 comments, staff said, August 11, including a petition circulated by Charlotte Gill, whose Southwest Harbor property abuts Tremont. Gill’s petition asking for more time and deer-related data gathered 204 signatures.
Mount Desert Island is currently closed to all deer hunting, but the state commissioner can open a town to deer hunting if the town agrees, Nathan Bieber, Maine state deer biologist, has explained.
Tremont did agree at a May 2026 vote, approving a limited deer hunt in its town with a vote of 314-227.
The state commission’s vote—with just one commissioner opposed—opens a special hunt for three years in November unless IFW or the town’s Select Board decides to suspend it.
Acadia National Park creates a unique situation and environment, Wildlife Division Director Nate Webb said during the August meeting. The park bans hunting. Acadia National Park sits on approximately half of Bar Harbor’s land mass and extends well into other portions of Mount Desert Island. When deer tend to have negative pressures in one area, they move to another.
The Town of Tremont would administer the hunt.
In Spring 2025, the town began to explore ways to deal with deer issues.
Deer haven’t been hunted on the island since the 1930s except when it has been declared a “nuisance” deer situation. Southwest Harbor also discussed concerns about accidents with vehicles and deer, deer ticks, and deer eating vegetation in 2024.
Back in 2013, a Bar Harbor task force studied how Lyme disease had increased on Mount Desert Island by a factor of four since 2006. Similarly, there was a doubling of deer and vehicle accidents compared to numbers in the early 2000s and 1990s.
In 2013-2014, the task force studied data and hunting methods. The goal had been to create a phased hunting proposal to reduce the deer herd population to a density of 10-15 every square mile.
Discussions about potentially thinning down the herd brought standing room only crowds to the Bar Harbor Town Council Chambers.
On April 3, 2025, Maine House Minority Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham (R-Winter Harbor) presented a bill, LD 1438, that he was sponsoring to the Committee on Inland Fisheries and Wildlife that would make it legal to hunt deer on Mount Desert Island.
On May 7 at an IFW Committee meeting, the committee unanimously voted that the bill ought not to pass (ONTP), which “killed the bill in committee.”
Since that decision was made, the Tremont Select Board had been refining plans to hold a special deer hunt in Tremont as a way to attempt to reduce the number of deer-involved car crashes, destruction of private property through deer grazing, and instances of Lyme disease in humans.
According to Webb, the present ban on deer hunting was implemented by the 85th Maine Legislature and reference to a closed season on deer on Mount Desert Island (MDI) first appeared in 1931.
All other animals that can be legally hunted in Maine can also currently be hunted on MDI.
“How will we know whether we reduced the population—or simply frightened deer into neighboring communities?” Gill had asked in her petition language “These are not anti-hunting questions. They are management questions. If we cannot tell the public approximately how many deer we have before we start killing them, exactly what number are we managing?”
The responsible order, she said, is to study first, plan second, and then manage.
The IFW’s public hearing was July 20; no one spoke at the meeting, but the commission received 21 written public comments by July 30. Five comments were mixed support or unclear, mentioning shorter time period for the hunt, hopes for deer studies to occur prior, or a one-year pause before the hunt begins.
Fourteen of the commenters could be directly linked to Mount Desert Island communities. Some were unlabeled.
“The hunt may be in Tremont, but it is not the only ‘affected town’ as wounded and dying deer will cross town borders, and the hunt will change deer movement patterns in ways that will affect all four towns,” Lorraine Aronson explained via submitted email to the commission. “Because of the reality of this widespread effect, it is clear that the Commissioner’s obligation to ‘each affected town’ extends to all four towns. The affected towns of Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, and Southwest Harbor must be given the opportunity to weigh in on deer hunting anywhere on MDI before the Commissioner renders a final decision. The ban is island-wide, and any change to it should be treated as an island-wide matter.”
Four commenters were in support and cited problems such as property damage, self impacts, and accidents.
Comments against the plan had a range of reasons. One challenged the commission’s authority to make the change. Others were worried about Acadia National Park visitors using the park and entering Tremont unknowingly during the season.
There were also people, like Aronson, wishing that their neighboring town’s concerns be involved in the Tremont hunting plan.
“There were several comments” asking for a one-year moratorium for more study and data collection, staff said.
One worry was over the language and if the statute was legal.
“The rationale for the hunt also bears examination. Some residents want to hunt here, even though one does not have to travel far to hunt on the mainland. Others say the deer population has grown, but Maine policy aims to ‘maintain deer populations in balance with available habitat,’ and there is no study or empirical evidence that they are out of balance on MDI. Some folks are frustrated by damage to their gardens, but there are fences, repellants, and other responses short of killing. Some point to the growing number of car/deer accidents, but visitation to the island has doubled in the last decade, a far more logical explanation for the increase. Ticks are a problem, but reducing the white-footed mouse population (the animal that infects tick larvae with the disease) would be more effective than killing deer. And what about owners who don’t want the hunt encroaching on their land? Will information about stand locations be made available so we can be prepared to protect our kids and pets?” Aronson wrote.
One commission member, Jim Andrews, was also concerned about the legal basis of the statute and its wording and wanted to ask for a written opinion from the attorney general’s office that it was legally sound.
His concern was that the commissioner might be putting himself in legal peril if the special hunt was approved. He worried that there wasn’t any information or data to support the amount of deer or that the population has reached its social carrying capacity as it related to the language of the ordinance. He said he was in favor of the proposal that would give the town a unique tool to help control the deer population, but was worried about the legality.
Staff had run it by the attorney general’s office, Webb said. The attorney general had no problems with the legality of the special hunt, but there was no written comment asserting this.
There are stages for the commission’s action and review. The commissioners unanimously moved the request for the hunt from stage 2 and to stage 3, which is when decisions are made. Andrews’ was the one nay vote on that final decision.
During the meeting, Acting Commissioner Tim Peabody said that there should be no public discussion after the public comment deadline. People can, however, petition the agency with its issues. People also commented at the end of the meeting about their reasons for not supporting the decision.
Tim Bannon, of Tremont, said the petition before Tremont had not been in the form of a question and didn’t have anything to do with the standard to grant an exception.
There are other factors that concern him, including the threat of violence in Tremont and neighboring towns because of hunting activity. Bannon said it hasn’t been demonstrated what resources will be needed to enforce the hunt’s rules and he worried that the MDIFW didn’t have the capacity to watch over the hunt. Similarly, he did not think that the local police department, which is in Southwest Harbor, has the capacity to oversee it.
He called it an “ill-considered venture.”
Peabody said that the commissioner can reach out to Tremont ahead of time to ensure enforcement.
George Sanker, of Tremont, said the statute has one condition for a special hunt, which is to maintain deer populations and balance habitat. That, he said, means a town needs to show credible evidence that the deer population is out of balance with the habitat for a special hunt to occur.
“There is plenty of available habitat,” he said, not only in Tremont but the entire island because of Acadia National Park, and that the deer are in balance with Mount Desert Island in its entirety.
Peter J. McKosy of Peace Ridge Sanctuary said many people consider wildlife “as neighbors and not commodities to be consumed.” He also asked what coexistence education and actions have been done on MDI to address deer coexistence.
Webb said there is a section on the state’s website as well as new positions at the state level to help with lowering conflicts with different wildlife species. Deer is one of those species.
For some local residents, the Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Advisory Council meeting about the consideration of the proposed Tremont special deer hunt drew concerns about the meeting’s accessibility.
In an August 11, early morning email to the commission, Gill wrote, “Last evening, it was brought to my attention that a significant discrepancy in the State’s publicly available information concerning the location of today’s meeting.”
That discrepancy focused on the physical address of where the meeting would take place.
The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s official Advisory Council meeting page and its minutes from the June 10 advisory council meeting said it would be held at 353 Water Street, Room 400, in Augusta.
“However, the Maine Legislature’s official Weekly Legislative Calendar identifies today’s 9:30 a.m. Advisory Council meeting as taking place at 15 Game Farm Road, Gray, Maine,” Gill wrote. “I understand that the meeting is, in fact, expected to take place in Gray.”
For Gill, that matters because “a member of the public relying upon the Department’s own official website—or upon the location previously announced in the Council’s official minutes—could reasonably travel to Augusta this morning expecting to attend the meeting, only to discover that it is being conducted approximately an hour away in Gray.”
Gill also asked if the meeting was posted in a newspaper. She requested the meeting be postponed due to the different conflicting locations.
It was not.
The meeting was advertised in the Kennebec Journal and legislative agenda as being in Gray. The commission had staff in Augusta in case someone went to that location. No one had arrived to that location.
During public comment at the end of the meeting, Bannon said he appreciated Augusta posting someone at the other potential site, but that it was confusing.
“I simply did not want to wander for hours in a car and miss the meeting entirely,” Bannon said. Like several others, he attended online.
You can find Gill’s petition here: https://c.org/gFG7NmDRqr
*Portions of this article have appeared in previous articles about the deer hunting history. Those articles have been written by both Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar.
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