PA: New USP president now a lobbyist on deer issue

PA: New USP president now a lobbyist on deer issue By Jeff Mulhollem Editor

Harrisburg - Pittsburgh businessman Randy Santucci took over as president of the Unified Sportsmen of Pennsylvania Oct. 10.

On Oct. 11 he was in the Governor's Office here meeting with three advisers of Gov. Tom Corbett, talking about the "deer problem" in much of the northern tier.

Santucci, who had been very involved in the group's failed lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Game Commission over deer management, confirmed that the organization has dropped its appeal to Commonwealth Court.

"Actually, it was never filed," he said. "We decided early last spring, at the last minute, and we instructed our attorney not to proceed with the legal action.

"We saw that it was a futile attempt after our lawsuit was thrown out by a judge two weeks before our hearing was scheduled.

"So we decided to go in a different direction. Rather than rehashing the legal dispute, we are asking the governor and lawmakers to intervene."

Unified leaders were "deflated" when their lawsuit was thrown out of court because the group had expended so much time and money.

"We just could not go back to our members and ask for more," Santucci recalls.

Specifically, Unified is asking elected officials to somehow force the Game Commission to change its deer-management program by sharply reducing the number of antlerless deer licenses sold in the northern tier - to allow deer populations to grow.

"The Unified sportsmen are far from rolling over," said Santucci, who owns a hunting camp in Warren County.

"We are not looking for a deer behind every tree, as our critics contend, but we are seeking to make the commission comply with Title 34 and maintain a deer population in the northcentral adequate to support hunting."

In his meeting with the governor's staff, Santucci - who was a finalist for a game commissioner seat a few years back - reviewed the sharp downward trend in hunting license sales in Pennsylvania.

He believes the sharp decline has resulted from mismanagement of deer in the state's northern tier.

In states like Michigan, Ohio and New York, from 1999 to present, hunting license sales have not plummeted the way they have in Pennsylvania, he pointed out. For instance, he noted, in Ohio out-of-state hunting license sales are up sharply.

"Why do you think that is," he asked. "I can't prove it, but I think they are Pennsylvania hunters going to Ohio to hunt deer."

In much of the northern tier, Santucci contends, the balance between sporting needs and forest habitat (timber) needs has been lost.

"Deer numbers are still so low on public lands in many management units, predation by bears and coyotes is keeping deer populations from recovering," he said.

"I told the governor's advisers, ‘Gentlemen, we are seeing a crash in hunting license sales - especially youth and out-of-state licenses - and we have to stop the bleeding.

"‘The Game Commission's deer program is crushing Pennsylvania's hunting tradition and ruining the state's rural economy in the northcentral region.'"

Game Commissioner Dave Putnam, of Centre County - who said he has "tried to talk to Santucci about the forests in Wildlife Management Unit 2G" - was not bothered by him lobbying the governor to intervene in deer management.

But he suggested that the new Unified president is misguided.

"The elected officials are listening to both sides in the debate, but I believe they are hearing good comments from people they know and trust, and they actually have a positive image of the Game Commission's current deer program," he said.

"The number one reason we don't have more deer in the northcentral is shade - not acid rain, not predators, not doe licenses.

"Forest stage is the primary control on deer populations in the northcentral - in much of the region we have mature northern hardwoods forests that don't provide much food. Deer eat brush, and in those forests, the canopies create so much shade that it doesn't allow undergrowth."

Putnam argued that deer hunting in much of the region is improving quickly - and many hunters now realize it.

"As the forests are cut, I think it is happening. I know one hunter who quit hunting in my area of McKean County for several years because deer numbers were low, but now he is back hunting.

"I know many people who are seeing deer numbers rebound. But it's true, there are areas just 10 miles away where that is not the case. It depends on the forest."

The "good old days" of deer hunting in the northern tier were "set up" by commercial timber harvesting, Putnam pointed out. But now those northern hardwoods - birch, beech, maple and black cherry - need to be harvested again.

"On my first deer hunt in 1960 in southern McKean County, I saw 50 deer in a herd," recalls Putnam, who later earned a Penn State forestry education. "I never saw that many again, because the forests became mature and no longer provided ideal habitat for deer."

Regarding predation, Putnam said he has been closely watching the percentage of button bucks in the northcentral counties' antlerless harvest. "That number has always been about 21 percent, and if increased predation is occurring, it would go down and it hasn't," he explained.

"Predation could be an issue at the local level, but it is not at the wildlife management unit level."

Game Commission press secretary Jerry Feaser downplayed the significance of Santucci's meeting with the governor's staff. He noted that elected officials have been meeting with the leaders of sportsmen's clubs for generations.

"It is not news that the leader of a sportsmen's organization meets with the governor's staff or lawmakers in an effort to influence Game Commission policy," he said. "That has been happening as long as the agency has existed.

"Prior governors, legislators and sportsmen's leaders have met regularly, whether it is Unified Sportsmen, the Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs, the trappers, the bowhunters, or whomever.

"It speaks volumes to the fact that elected officials recognize that hunters and trappers are an important voting block when it comes to shaping policy on issues that affect them."

YEP get the politicians involved in game situations....

I guess thats what one HAS to do. No choice. You can't get anyone else to push forth curative legislation. Thats their job.

Yep guys are going to Ohio to hunt and guys from Ohio are coming here..Duuhhhhhh

Pa non resident license sales are down 22% for the same time frame that Ohios sales have doubled. Nice try Doc but FAIL

Not more math.

I'll stick with the experts and their opinions on just how bad the coyote predation is in Pa...and this is from LAST year ====

From the Penn State News Service Published: 3/16/2010



University Park, Pa. a question that has captured the imagination of Keystone State deer hunters and wildlife lovers: Has increased predation on helpless deer fawns by an growing population of Eastern coyotes resulted in dwindling whitetail numbers across Pennsylvania's rugged northern reaches? The answer is no, according to a deer researcher in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.
" a cruel world out there for wildlife," said Duane Diefenbach, adjunct professor of wildlife ecology and leader of the Pennsylvania Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit housed in the college's School of Forest Resources," no crueler in Pennsylvania than other states"

There is no question the coyote population has grown dramatically in the Northeast in recent decades, he said, and everyone agrees that coyotes do prey on fawns, “but our data tell us that coyote predation is not an issue in Pennsylvania."

Diefenbach should know. Nationally recognized for his deer research, he has been involved in all of the Pennsylvania Game Commission's deer studies since 2000, overseeing a groundbreaking fawn-mortality study completed in 2002. For the last decade he and his students have been monitoring hundreds of deer they captured and fitted with radio collars, about 3,000 in total, carefully documenting the animals' movements, behavior and fates.

“Significantly, very, very few adult deer in our studies have succumbed to predation from coyotes, bears or anything else," he said. “We now know that in this state, once a deer reaches about 12 months of age, the only significant mortal dangers it faces are getting hit by a car or being harvested by a hunter. By far, most of the time when a coyote eats venison, it is from a road-killed animal, or from a deer that was wounded by a hunter but not retrieved."

We know fawns often are killed and eaten by coyotes and bears, Diefenbach said, but that has always been the case.

“When we monitored more than 200 radio-collared fawns from 2000 to 2002, the survival rates of fawns in Pennsylvania were similar to what was previously found in Maine, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa and New Brunswick, Canada," he said. “Our research has shown that overall mortality here is not extraordinary."

About 50 percent of fawns make it to six months of age, Diefenbach said.

“The general pattern in Pennsylvania and in other states and provinces is that we have seen slightly higher fawn survival rates in agricultural areas because there is less predation, and in forested habitats we see slightly lower survival rates."

According to Diefenbach, the literature shows that fawn survival for the first year of life in forested landscapes is about 25 percent.

“Our work showed that Pennsylvania came in at about 28 percent," he said. “Our research also showed that fawns in Pennsylvania agricultural landscapes have a 52 percent survival rate."

Some people have encouraged the Game Commission to implement a study of fawn predation by coyotes, but Diefenbach contends that it is not needed.

“I know this may be an unpopular view, but it is not readily apparent to me how another study on fawn mortality will help us better manage deer,"he said. “Our 2000-to-2002 fawn study showed that fawn-predation rates were normal here, and I don't have any evidence that anything has changed since then, no available data, such as changes in hunter-success rates in harvesting deer, suggest that coyote predation is increasing. If it is, then hunters should be harvesting fewer young deer, and we are not seeing that."

Diefenbach points to information contained in recent years' deer-hunter harvests that show fawn predation is not growing at an alarming rate.

“The fawn component of the hunter harvest, typically about 40 percent of antlerless deer killed by hunters, has remained largely unchanged for many years. If fewer fawns were surviving because of increased coyote predation, they would not be available to hunters."

Still, Diefenbach understands the emotional reaction of hunters and wildlife lovers to fawns being killed and eaten by predators such as coyotes, and he said that continuing deer research conducted by his unit at Penn State is examining fawn numbers and survival.

“Peoples' natural reaction to hearing and seeing coyotes, and knowing that they are everywhere in Pennsylvania, is to wonder how many fawns they kill,"he said, “but I don't know what we would learn if we conducted another fawn-survival study, especially because of what we already know about deer-coyote ecology. I am advising a graduate student right now who is evaluating the assumptions and methods that we use to track and monitor deer-population trends in this state. His research is focused on the validity of the model we use to manage deer. All of his work done so far, both in the field and with computer simulations, doesn't show any evidence of a decline in deer numbers because we are not recruiting fawns into the population."

What I posted was from Penn State not the PGC ....

The answer is no, according to a deer researcher in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

" just what do you suppose the coyotes are feeding on."

Roadrunners. D@m don't you ever watch TV?

Roadrunners. D@m don't you ever watch TV?

If our Pa whitetails have to avoid coyotes like Wylie.. I see no problem

ORIGINAL: Dr. Trout

Roadrunners. D@m don't you ever watch TV?

If our Pa whitetails have to avoid coyotes like Wylie.. I see no problem

I take that as an insult Doc

From every state wildlife management agency study on coyotes that Ive read, be it Texas, WV, South Carolina etc... Every single one states coyotes as a major factor in deer predation in those repective states.

Of course, as usual, we are different when it comes to deer management issues. If its something that is common knowledge or conventional wisdom, our frontrunning groundbreaking pioneering movers and shakers at pgc must go against the grain. They never seem to go with flow when it comes to addressing our deer issues, thanks to the bizarre higly political antideer agenda. If they acknowledged that coyotes & other preds. were indeed a factor, not to be downplayed they know they would be expected to lighten up on the allocations to make up some of the difference. Lessening the allocations is not something they are interested in, predation or no predation.