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Coyotes-Wolves-Cougars.blogspot.com

Grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, coyotes, cougars/ mountain lions,bobcats, wolverines, lynx, foxes, fishers and martens are the suite of carnivores that originally inhabited North America after the Pleistocene extinctions. This site invites research, commentary, point/counterpoint on that suite of native animals (predator and prey) that inhabited The Americas circa 1500-at the initial point of European exploration and subsequent colonization. Landscape ecology, journal accounts of explorers and frontiersmen, genetic evaluations of museum animals, peer reviewed 20th and 21st century research on various aspects of our "Wild America" as well as subjective commentary from expert and layman alike. All of the above being revealed and discussed with the underlying goal of one day seeing our Continent rewilded.....Where big enough swaths of open space exist with connective corridors to other large forest, meadow, mountain, valley, prairie, desert and chaparral wildlands.....Thereby enabling all of our historic fauna, including man, to live in a sustainable and healthy environment. - Blogger Rick

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Friday, November 19, 2010

I recently purchased Bill Krohn's recently published EARLY MAINE WILDLIFE and as the review below attests: It indeed is a treasure chest full of first hand historical accounts of the indigenous wildlife that occupied what is now the State of Maine from 1605 into the early 20th Century............I recommend it highly for anyone interested in the most complete to date compilation of the Wildlife of this region(yes there were wolves, cougars, bears, wolverines, fishers, marten, bobcats, caribou, etc, etc )..............A shout out to both Bill and Chris Hoving who are both friends of this blog............Well done Gents!!!!!

Deirdre Fleming: A glimpse of Maine wildlife's olden days

Aroostook County apparently had no white-tailed deer in 1850.

click image to enlarge
"Early Maine Wildlife" contains historical accounts of northern animals covering 327 years.
Courtesy University of Maine Press
'EARLY MAINE WILDLIFE'

THE BOOK costs $34.95 and is available at local bookstores and from the University of Maine Press,
126A College Ave., Orono, ME 04473. Or order it online at www.umaine.edu/umpress.
The debate over whether to return wolves to the state dates back to at least the 1880s.And whether there is a resident mountain lion population here has been a question for centuries.

These are some of the wildlife questions that arise out of the historical accounts documented in "Early Maine Wildlife," just released by the University of Maine Press in Orono.
The reference book is the work of William Krohn, a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
 Krohn wrote the book with help from Christopher Hoving, a former gradaute student at UMaine and now the endangered species coordinator at the Michigan Department for Natural Resources.

Krohn said the unique collection of accounts should shed light on the past, but not necessarily tell the story of Maine's northern forestland."It's a way of getting some insight into the past," Krohn said. "Putting all the pieces together is not the purpose of the book. It's just to assemble the information. The stories are yet to be told on how wildlife changed and why."

The 523-page book looked at 529 historical records or references, covering a period of 327 years. Canada lynx are mentioned in 117 historical records, moose in 192, white-tailed deer in 244, and mountain lion,caribou, wolves and wolverines in many others.Krohn is careful to caution about the book's limitations.
For example, he said Mainers centuries ago reported seeing "wildcats," but it's not clear whether the reference is to bobcats, Canada lynx or mountain lions.Still, "Early Maine Wildlife" offers a rare glimpse into early Maine life.
George Matula, the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife's endangered species coordinator, said in 29 years as a state biologist he's never seen a resource like Krohn's."Trying to go into all that literature that he eventually did is very difficult and very time consuming. And many of us biologists don't have time to go into that type of thing," Matula said.

Mark McCollough, an endangered species biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said looking at "Early Maine Wildlife" as a body of work, it paints a clear picture."uncovering this treasure of writing that occurred largely in the late 1800s, it really does provide a valuable historic reference to be able to try to piece together what happened to those animals," McCollough said.In fact, after reading Krohn's book, McCollough now thinks the migration of white-tailed deer in the late 1890s up to Aroostook County may have led to the caribou's decline, because of brain worm being passed from the deer to the caribou."They didn't know what brain worm was then," McCollough said.

"It's pretty apparent from the writing in this book that it wasn't until the 1860s and the 1870s that you started to see deer with some frequency in central Maine. And it wasn't until the 1870s that deer made it up to southern Aroostook County. They never really did occur there historically. It certainly is enlightening to me to see now the bigger picture of what happened."Krohn hopes people use the book as a resource and a starting point.

"Really the story in this book is just how dynamic and changeable things have been. The take-home message here is: wildlife populations are not static and they haven't been. This book clearly shows this. And we need to stop thinking of them as static," Krohn said.

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