AUGUSTA – There will be fewer moose permits next fall for the first time in the hunt’s history because of a vote Thursday by the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s Advisory Council.

Commissioners set the number of permits for the 2003 season at about 2,500, down from 3,000 in recent years, a drop of about 17 percent.

Although hunter success rates remain high, other population indicators point to a herd that has stopped growing and may actually be in decline, said Ken Elowe, director for the bureau of resource management. Moose sightings reported by hunters have declined by half in recent years in some areas – a “radical change,” Elowe said.

Karen Morris, a state wildlife biologist, explained a long list of factors that could be to blame, from less clearcutting to an infestation of winter ticks preying on moose calves, to reductions in the amount of snowfall. Overhunting is not thought to be a cause, the biologist said.

“It’s like a detective story,” Elowe said. “We’ll never have as good information as we want … but if all the pieces are going in the same direction, it gives you a clue to what’s going on.”

Structuring the permit reduction was a balancing act, Elowe said. Eventually, biologists recommended eliminating the any-moose hunting permit and, instead, assigning hunters either a bull-only permit or an antlerless moose-only permit, which would allow hunters to take females and yearling males.

The number of antlerless moose permits will be kept quite low – about 500 statewide – to protect potential mothers and to guarantee a good crop of calves in the spring, Elowe said.

The changes have been controversial among hunters, many of whom believe that more concrete data about the potential population decline is necessary before the hunt is changed. The Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, the state’s largest hunting lobby, has criticized the decision.

The moose hunt makes about $1.2 million each fall in permit and licensing fees for DIF&W, and many hunters advocate spending much of that revenue on infrared moose surveys, a means of estimating the herd size that is thought by many to be more reliable than moose sighting reports.

However, conducting such surveys over all moose habitat in the state would cost the department $1 million – money that the state just can’t afford right now, Commissioner Lee Perry said.

The department relies on moose revenue to keep many of the day-to-day DIF&W operations going in difficult economic times, he said. No one advocated moose survey funding during last winters contentious budget debates, he said.

One aerial survey, at a price of $60,000, was completed in Greenville several years ago, and another is possible for this winter. Both used grant funding, Elowe said.

And last year, about $240,000 of the moose hunt revenue was used for moose sighting surveys and other types of population analysis, Perry said.

“It’s not as if we were going into this totally blind,” the commissioner said.

Despite some hunter opposition, the council unanimously supported the new rules Thursday, saying that if they must err, they would err on the side of caution.

“I was not appointed by the governor to this group to manage hunters. I was appointed to manage the resource,” said councilor Harold “Brownie” Brown of Bangor.

The 2003 rules will also create a moose season for the first time in Wildlife Management District 17, a portion of central Maine that includes parts of Penobscot and Piscataquis counties, including Bangor in the south.

The rural northern portion of the district provides good habitat for a decent-sized moose herd, so 30 permits have been allocated to the district for the 2003 October hunt.