Hunters lament lack of deer, but farmers beg to differ
Sunday, January 16, 2005

By Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette



There are 1.6 million deer in Pennsylvania, so many that they are eating themselves out of forests, farms and parts of their home range.






The voracious herd has prevented tree regrowth in vast tracts of the commonwealth's commercially valuable hardwood forests, eats millions of dollars of farm crops and collides with thousands of cars and trucks, causing damage and death.

Yet there aren't enough deer for some hunters, who aren't seeing as many through their rifle scopes as they did a couple of years ago.

Those hunters now want the state to go back to rules that would put greater limits on how many deer can be killed, and they already are gaining some political support for their position.

A recent study refutes the hunters' claims, though.

A three-year examination of the deer overpopulation problem, released last week by Audubon Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Habitat Alliance, found that a century of protective management has caused the herd to balloon and has created a massive ecological imbalance in the state's forests.

The study said hunting season changes instituted in 2000, which were designed primarily to increase the number of doe that could be killed, have started to reduce the herd, and recommends that deer density be further reduced by expanding hunting opportunities in high-density deer areas.

But the study's findings are unlikely to convince some hunters, whose complaints about a scarcity of whitetails, especially on some state forests and game lands in northern tier counties, are expected to dominate next week's Pennsylvania Game Commission meeting in Harrisburg.

Ralph Saggiomo, president of Unified Sportsmen of Pennsylvania, said he expected the total deer harvest numbers to decline for the hunting season that ends this month, and called on the Game Commission to reduce the hunting pressure on does when it meets next week.

State Sen. Rich Kasunic, D-Uniontown, reacting to constituent complaints, also has called on the commission to abandon its new management practices, reduce the number of doe licenses and return to separate buck and doe seasons.

The commission will propose preliminary season and bag limits for 2005-06 at that meeting, and take final action in April, after it sees final totals for this hunting season's deer harvest.

"We need changes in January. We can't wait," said Saggiomo, whose group represents about 60,000 of the state's 1 million hunters. "In some areas of the southeast, southwest and northwest counties, there may be a deer overpopulation problem, but the commission does not have a credible sense of the size of the deer herd in the state forests and game lands."

Saggiomo, who lives in Bradford County and has a hunting camp in the woods nine miles away, said he and other hunters were not seeing the tracks in the snow, deer droppings and tree rubbings they did in years gone by.

"Our family's fifth generation of hunters is coming along now, but my grandson stood for two days overlooking a corn field and didn't see a one," Saggiomo said.

"There are thousands of hunting camps located in the traditional hunting areas in the state's northern counties and occupied by four or five or six generations of hunters. Those areas can sustain a deer herd but the herd there is decimated."


A resignation in protest


At the core of the dispute between those who want to see fewer deer in Penn's Woods and those who want to see more in their gun sights are hunting season and kill limit changes instituted under the leadership of Gary Alt, who was hired by the commission to be its deer management program director in 1999.

Alt resigned last month, citing political pressure to change the hunting season and bag limits back to the way they were before, and lack of support from the commission.

Before 2000, the basic deer season consisted of a two-week buck season, followed by a three-day doe season. There also were special muzzleloader, flintlock and archery seasons.

Alt, with commission approval, changed the hunting season to a two-week concurrent season for bucks and does, effectively expanding the season to hunt female deer by nine days, and issued more doe licenses. The special seasons remained. Restrictions on shooting immature bucks were added in an attempt to produce bigger bucks, and the deer management assistance program, allowing additional hunting in areas where deer density was known to be high, was instituted.

"We knew that if we issued more licenses and hunting was allowed for more days, we would see greater numbers of deer taken," said Jerry Feaser, a Game Commission spokesman. "Before the changes, we were overharvesting bucks and under-harvesting does."

The new regulations had an immediate effect. In 1999, 378,592 deer were harvested, 194,368 bucks and 184,224 does. In 2000, the total kill jumped to 504,600; 203,221 of them bucks and 301,379 does, a doe harvest increase of almost two-thirds.

The total kill declined slightly in 2001 to 486,014, and went up in 2002 to a record 517,529, 352,113 of them does. In 2003, the last year for which figures are available, the deer harvest declined to 464,890; 142,270 bucks and 322,620 does.

The commission staff has recommended keeping the concurrent seasons and bag limits the same as last year.

"By the time of the April meeting, we'll have the 2004 harvest data available," Feaser said, "and be able to determine if any changes should be made."


From decimation to glut


A century ago, Pennsylvania's forests had been clear cut to supply voracious timber and chemical industries, all but eliminating the habitat of the few deer that had avoided the cross-hairs of unregulated hunters. Deer were so scarce that the Pennsylvania Game Commission, established in 1895 in part to "bring back" the herd, brought in 700 from Michigan and Virginia to restock the state.

A "sacred doe" philosophy was born in the hunting community to protect the breeders, and the herd grew with the state's forests, rebounding so successfully that, by the early 1920s, concerns were already being voiced about the negative effects of too many deer in some parts of the state.

Those concerns were ignored for another 50 years as the herd grew and deer management in the state was left, as the old saying goes, to "bullets and Buicks," that is, hunting and car accidents. The Pennsylvania Legislature designated the whitetail deer, odocoileus virginanus, the state's "official animal" in 1959, but that merely confirmed the status already bestowed by hunters.

The Game Commission recognized the deer herd was growing too large in the late 1970s, but its efforts to halt the growth were ineffective.

By the 1980s, the herd in the northwestern counties had peaked at more than 50 deer per square mile, a density the heavily forested area could not sustain. Deer densities in the area now range from 19 to 49. The state average is about 25 per square mile.

The big herd has nibbled much of the state's woodland shrubs, wildflowers and saplings down to nubs, altering the natural balance of the forest, decimating habitat needed by other animals and songbirds and putting generations of commercially valuable ash, poplar, oak, sugar maple and black cherry at risk.

Merlin Benner, a state Bureau of Forestry wildlife biologist and a member of the Deer Management Forum, which produced the Audubon study, said that, despite recent declines in the deer density in state forests, no one was talking about removing any of the more than 700 miles of fencing that's been erected to exclude deer.

"In vast areas of the state's forest there are no trees between 10 and 60 years old. If you look at that in terms of lost timber value, it's in the billions of dollars," Benner said.

"Habitat was also lost for grouse, the state bird; snowshoe hare; songbirds; and butterflies. All play a role in creating a healthy habitat."

The bigger herd has also increased the number of vehicle-deer collisions. The Game Commission estimates that between 45,000 and 60,000 deer are killed on state roads annually, and the number of deer-vehicle crashes causing human fatalities has increased.

Farmers also sustain damage. A 1980 report by researchers at Penn State University said deer cost the state's farmers about $30 million a year. In 1996, another Penn State study estimated farmers' annual losses for five crops -- corn for grain, corn for silage, alfalfa, oats and cabbage -- at $74 million.

Jeff Grove, the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau's wildlife specialist, said farmers throughout the western part of the state and in Susquehanna, Wayne, Pike, Tioga, Potter, Northampton and Dauphin counties were all reporting extensive crop damage.

"Agriculture's problem is that most hunting occurs on private land and farmers are footing the bill for feeding the deer herd," Grove said.

"And the profit margins for some farmers are so thin that feeding those deer makes it hard for them to exist."

Grove said the Farm Bureau's 34,000 members favored a continuation of the present deer management policies and an increase in the number of special management areas to target deer "hot spots."


Regulations have an effect


Some estimates put the current size of the deer herd at 20 percent more than the carrying capacity of the forests, that is, the size of the herd that will still allow the full forest ecosystems to regenerate.

But there's evidence that the 2000 regulations are having the desired effect.

Ken Kane, a nationally known consulting forester, said he was seeing both big bucks and a reduction in the herd in many forested areas and also some plant species that mostly have been missing from the forest for 20 years.

"The bottom line is we've gone from a subjective view of what the deer herd and forest should be to listening to scientists speaking quite objectively about what's good for a forest in balance," Kane said.

"That's what the policymakers need to keep in perspective. Science shows us that the deer herd has been out of balance with its habitat for 70 years."

One of those policymakers, Roxane Palone, southwestern Pennsylvania's representative to the state Game Commission, said she was comfortable with the current deer hunting regulations, and that sometimes getting a deer just means moving to a new area.

"Hunting's changed. People sit in tree stands and don't move about as much as they used to," Palone said.

"They hunt in the same spots year after year, even when the habitat's changed."

In the "old days," by which Palone means 20 years ago, her husband and brothers would all head north to hunting camps in Warren or Potter or McKean counties while she tromped through public game lands and private farms near their home in Greene County.

"Now, they all come out and hunt with me. They don't go up there anymore," she said. "Things are changing, but they don't change overnight."

quote:

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...my grandson stood for two days overlooking a corn field and didn't see a one," Saggiomo said

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Well..., what more proof does a person need?!?!?! Apparently there isn't a single Deer left anywhere in that area.(Yeah, Right!)

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I'd have been looking for "Tracks". If there weren't any, I sure wouldn't have bothered to hunt there. If there were tracks, then I'd speculate there were in fact Deer in the area.(Duuuuuhhhh!)

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It is an eternal balancing act for the various Game Departments in every State. Some seem to be a lot better at it than others. It appears the North Carolina Rules & Regs were written by anti-hunters, Kentucky seems to micro-manage the herd, and on and on. Just different from place to place.

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Gary Alt? For some reason that name sounds familiar to me. Anyone else ever hear of him before?

Gary Alt is at least one person who has injected science into game management .There is a video available from the PA Game Commission, made by Alt, about black bears in PA.Not a hunting tape but a very fine discription of bear life in PA. A video well worth the money.Some of this info has appeared on TV.The low deer number complaints are valid. Here in the Catskill Mtns of NY I have hunted the same areas for many years . The low deer take was not a surprise (I never saw one !and I almost always get one) When you check the trails , it's easy to "count " the deer - how many trails are used and how much traffic do the trails get. The consensus here and in PA is that they have been giving out too many doe permits over the last ~ 5 years which has gradually reduced herd size. Of course there are exceptions. There are areas that cannot be hunted since they are in urban or suburban areas and of course private land where owners don't permit hunting.