RAYMOND — Guy and Donna Letourneau drove to a favorite land-trust trail near their Raymond home for a weekend hike – only to find the parking lot full. So they simply moved on to one of their quiet, go-to spots during this period of uncertainty when people are clamoring to get outside and trails around Portland are packed.

They went to a wildlife management area.

“It’s kind of a secret spot,” Donna Letourneau said of the 1,250-acre Morgan Meadow Wildlife Management Area located in Raymond and Gray. “We got here at 9 o’clock and we haven’t seen anyone else here. And it’s kind of a perfect day.”

As the name suggests, Wildlife Management Areas are owned and managed by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife for wildlife conservation. These tracts of land – some as large as 6,000 acres – are different from Wildlife Management Districts, which delineate the 29 hunting zones around the state. Wildlife Management Areas are wild tracts of land purchased primarily for the benefit of wildlife, but with the added benefit of providing conserved land for recreation.

They are not designed like state parks with trail networks, bathrooms, maps and informational kiosks. Few even have privies. However, for generations these wild areas have been well used by hunters, fishermen and birders.

IFW owns 105,000 acres of Wildlife Management Areas across Maine, including 10 different wildlife areas totaling 33,000 acres in southern Maine and another 22 areas across 32,0000 acres in central Maine.

“We’re not big on the hiking trails, just the volume of traffic they tend to create,” said Regional Wildlife Biologist Keel Kemper in Sidney. “They create issues for wildlife management – they bring people and dogs. And when you have trails,  people want more trails. Then the trails become the focus, and it shifts away from the wildlife management.

“But just because there isn’t an asphalt path all the way through them, they still provide reasonable access.”

Most Wildlife Management Areas have no trail system – and the few trails that exist are not well signed. The exceptions are those wildlife areas where other organizations have helped create trail networks – such as the town of York in the case of the Mt. Agamenticus Wildlife Management Area, or Georges River Land Trust in the case of the 5,000-acre Gene Letourneau Wildlife Management Area at Frye Mountain near Belfast (named for the former outdoor writer from these newspapers – who had no relation to the Raymond couple in the story).

Nearly all Wildlife Management Areas have some old tote roads or logging roads, which provide not only easy traveling but an easy way to maintain six feet between other hikers when passing – as is recommended during the coronavirus pandemic.

Visitors also are welcome to bushwhack off trail, as hunters do, and in the case of the Frye Mountain wildlife area, as many visitors do to berry pick, apple pick and forage for mushrooms. Though during the hunting seasons – like the May turkey hunt going on now – it’s a good idea for all visitors to wear blaze orange, as it is for anyone going in the woods anywhere in Maine during a hunting season.

In Southern Maine just three wildlife areas get a fair amount of use: Mt. Agamenticus, the Scarborough Marsh and the Kennebunk Plains. But others are now starting to be discovered, said Regional Biologist Scott Lindsay in Gray. A few weeks ago at the 5,000-acre Vernon S. Walker Wildlife Management Area in Newfield, Lindsay had to post “no parking” signs along the road.

“It is designed for maybe 10 cars. It had about 25. I’ve never seen that before,” said Lindsey, who’s worked in the region since 2004.

In central Maine, only Frye Mountain has been very busy thus far, Kemper said.

However, both biologists said every one of Maine’s Wildlife Management Areas are well used by the wildlife.

While you’d never guess it, Kemper said the Alonzo H. Garcelon Wildlife Management Area in and around Augusta is a great place to see moose, which would please the famous Augusta doctor it’s named after.

The coastal wildlife areas in southern Maine – particularly Scarborough Marsh – are renowned as birding spots, but Lindsay said the wildlife areas more inland also are teeming with upland and migratory birds. He once saw a group of birders from Europe at the Major Gregory Sanborn wildlife area at the Brownfield Bog.

“Even though there are no signs telling you where everything is, it can still be nice to hike into a little pond or marsh. Maybe it doesn’t even have a name, but it can be a really special place and you can see a lot of wildlife,” Lindsay said.

The Morgan Meadow Wildlife Management Area is just 10 minutes from busy Route 302 in Raymond to the west and the Interstate 95 exit in Gray to the east. Yet it’s rather inconspicuous. The sign off Egypt Road is well back from the street and easily missed, while the dirt entrance road full of potholes is not very inviting.

On the last Saturday of April, there were only three cars in the parking area (other than two from this outdoor team) by 11 a.m. as three hiking groups enjoyed relative privacy in the wild area full of large boulders, babbling creeks and the hammering work of woodpeckers.

“We lived in Raymond probably seven or eight years before we found out about this,” Guy Letourneau said. “A neighbor told us about it. There’s usually only four to five couples here. The trails are not marked very well. But the one that passes by the little stream and goes up to the rocky hill is very pretty.”

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