WMD 17 — Maine

Tags & season

Fees and draw dates from Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, 2026, verified 2026-08-16 — past its verify-by date, confirm with the agency. Tag type from the agency's published draw statistics: a wmd that appears in none of them has no limited-entry hunt we know of. Source: MDIFW — Moose permit lottery (fees, chances, caps, deadline).

Season conditions — measured, not vibes

Harvest — agency survey estimates

Registered moose kill by WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT DISTRICT, season and permit type, with MDIFW's own success rates. Eighteen seasons, 2008-2025. ⚠️ THE DENOMINATOR HERE IS THE DRAW ITSELF, which is true of no other harvest series in this set. A Maine moose permit is a drawn tag, so `hunters` is exactly the number of people who won the lottery for that district — not an effort-survey estimate, and not absent. Success is what those permit holders did with them. Variants are SEASON × PERMIT TYPE: Maine runs September, October and a second October week, and issues bull-only (BOP) and antlerless-only (AOP) permits, so "oct-bop" and "2ndoct-aop" are genuinely different hunts in the same district. The `all` row is their sum. ⚠️ THE `all` ROW IS SUMMED FROM THE SEASON ROWS, NOT READ off the printed subtotal. Every season row is checked against MDIFW's own published success rate — kill over permits must reproduce the printed percentage or the row is refused — so summing verified numbers is sound. The printed *WMD Subtotals row is used only to cross-check that sum, because attributing a subtotal to its district is the one genuinely unreliable thing in this layout: the indentation of the district number moves between districts inside a single table. ⚠️ THE OLDER REPORTS ARE TWO-UP, two districts side by side per printed line, which is the third state in this set to do it. The column split is derived from where the records actually fall rather than from the middle of the line — a fixed midpoint filed three districts' totals under their neighbours in 2016, because the right-hand subtotal began two characters before it. 2005-2007 are a DIFFERENT publication: two years side by side in one table (2004 and 2005 registrations together), with no percent signs and a differently worded subtotal. They are not ingested rather than being half-read, so the series starts at 2008. ⚠️ WMD 4A HAS NO POLYGON. Maine splits district 4 for moose only and the boundary layer knows 1-29; its rows are kept under `4a` rather than folded into 4, which would inflate district 4's permits and kill by a third. It is a coverage gap, not an error. Deer and bear harvest are published by TOWN rather than by district and are not carried here — joining them would need a town-to-WMD crosswalk that MDIFW does not publish. Source: MDIFW — moose harvest reports, per WMD (2005-2025).