Deer Debate Rages

Debate regarding deer season rages
By Bob Frye, TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, July 11, 2010


There's never a meeting of Pennsylvania Game Commissioners that goes by without a lengthy and spirited discussion about white-tailed deer.

The board's most recent meeting was no exception.

Commissioner Tom Boop of Northumberland County had asked staff in the commission's bureau of wildlife management in April to find out if there was a way to address what he termed "cold spots," or areas that have too few deer. He suggested one possibility might be to manage deer on a township level.

Chris Rosenberry, head of the commission's deer section, gave a report on that request when the board met June 28 in Harrisburg.

It was not to Boop's liking.

Rosenberry said that the commission manages deer in 22 wildlife management units now. Managing deer by township would require having 2,600 management units.

What's more, the commission does not have, nor could it collect, enough data of any kind — be it about forest health, deer health or deer harvests — in that many units to make management decisions based on facts.

"To address cold spots, you want to limit hunting opportunity. And individual landowners right now have the opportunity to do that," Rosenberry said.

Boop disagreed. There are townships in the north-central part of the state that are 60 percent or more public land, he said. Anyone who buys a license can hunt those places, he said.

Given that, he said he would like to experiment with managing deer on a township level in at least spots in the north-central — such as management units 2G and 4D — using whatever limited data is available, "however unreliable it might be."

"I can't understand why everyone is so concerned and why everyone thinks this is such a difficult task. I'm not talking about hiring 100 people," he said.

Other commissioners, though, said the problem of few deer in those "big woods" spots is not necessarily the result of overhunting that can be addressed with smaller units.

"Yes, there are areas of 2G where the deer are just not there," said commissioner Greg Isabella of Philadelphia. "But the reason, when you talk to the professionals and the people out in the field, is that the habitat is just not there. I think that's being overlooked."

"The hunters are irrelevant in a large chunk of 2G, just because of the habitat," agreed commissioner Dave Putnam of Centre County. "I think the cold spots there are related to habitat."

Pennsylvania's hunters and their changing habits must be considered when talking about where hunters see deer and how frequently, said commissioner Ralph Martone of New Castle. The average age of a hunter nationally is 36; in Pennsylvania, it's nearly 50, he said. Those hunters are less concentrated in the state's northern tier than they were decades ago, too, because there "is good deer hunting in all 67 counties."

"That's spread out the hunters. I believe if you put the same number of hunters that used to be there back into the north-central (region), you'd see the deer harvest go up significantly," Martone said.

As it is, the commission for the last several years has been collaring antlerless deer in unit 2G, then tracking their movement and survival, said commissioner Dave Schreffler of Bedcford County. Ninety-two percent of those deer are surviving hunting seasons, he said.

Those statistics show that, if deer numbers are indeed low, it's not because hunters have been allowed to slaughter too many of them, especially on public land.

"The areas where we've looked for that, we just haven't seen it," added Rosenberry.

All of that talk left Boop admittedly frustrated. Calling himself the board's most frequent and vocal critic of a deer program based on things like concurrent buck and doe seasons "primarily to solve problems in the southeast and southwest" corners of the state, he maintained that large areas of the state have a problem with too few deer.

He just can't get enough people to agree, he said.

"I'm having a lot of difficulty convincing some people in this agency, and even on this board, that we have a problem," Boop said.




So once again the PGC is denying that the high harvests from 2000 to 2004 reduced the herd and are responsible for the very low deer densities in 2G.

They claimed they didn't have enough information on a county level to manage the herd properly and they also claimed the county boundaries weren't well defined and led to enforcement problems. But now they are claiming they are managing the herd based on one small survey plot for every 64 SM and I have yet to see an explanation of how they used forest health to determine antlerless allocations.

That is not what the board has been doing since 2000. They have been following the advice of the biologists, but that advice has not produced the predicted results. Now, the commissioners are backed into a corner and they are looking for a way out.

"Rosenberry is a biologist, right? So, Boop and the board should do what they usually do. Listen carefully to the advice of trained professionals then completely ignore it."

So youre saying you supported their recommendations to reduce tags & make the dmap included with allocations? Remember, Rosenberry was brought in to the deer team about the same time Alt was made head honcho and others were in place on the board & staff to "do the deed" with the deer herd. Having heard his "explanations" and addressing issues, i dont trust that guy as far as i could spit. Ive seen alot of deciet, damage control and things that contradict coming from that dude. Ignore him? Id go a step further and implore the board to fire his arse.

The overlooked factor is that we are assuming that deer are the major controlling factor for habitat, when in fact we have the final say in what type of habitat is present.

That is a very true statement and I will take one step further and say that those in power are basing the criteria for determining forest health based on their personal opinion rather than established scientific facts. They prefer that oaks ,ash and hard maple regenerate instead of red maple , striped maple ,beech and birch.

The report from ANF showed that if DCNR implemented all the forestry practices available, they could get adequate regeneration with over 25 DPSM. But, instead they tried to take the easiest and cheapest way out and simply reduce the herd.Now, they are finding out that reducing the herd did not produce the predicted results and now the PGC is backed into a corner with no easy way out, except to lie.