By Don Steese
Just when I was beginning to think that many Keystone State deer hunters were resigning themselves to the reality of fewer deer, we have a mass protest scheduled for today at the Pennsylvania Game Commission headquarters in Harrisburg.
Perhaps this season was so bad for so many that the fires have again been fanned, or maybe I’ve just not been around as many dissatisfied hunters lately. As I’ve stated before, we also had a lousy deer season this year but I also had to admit that we perhaps didn’t hunt as hard as we normally would. That still may be the case, but there does seem to be a lot of discontent out there.
The deer management issue is a complicated one. For years we had too many deer, now in some areas of the state, we have too few. This, in my opinion, is especially true on public land in the northern part of the state, which is also the traditional deer hunting Mecca of Pennsylvania.
Hunters hoping to see changes in the deer management program are being given fresh hope now, with two new members on the Board of Commissioners. These two are replacing two members who were supportive of a “stay the course” approach. We’ll have to wait and see how the two new commissioners will vote on deer management related issues.
Sunbury’s Tom Boop, a current commissioner, is quoted as saying he would like to see shorter concurrent/antlerless seasons, reduced antlerless license allocations, and the elimination of early senior/junior and muzzleloader seasons. The desired result could probably be achieved using any combination of those alternatives. If they slash antlerless license allocations, they lose much-needed revenue, but any meaningful change aimed at increasing deer numbers has to, in my opinion, include a reduction in the number of antlerless licenses that are issued.
The other options, shorter seasons and elimination of some specialty seasons, would perhaps allow the commission to achieve a goal of allowing the deer herd to grow without cutting the allocations quite as much, due to the fact that antlerless hunters would have less opportunity to fill a doe tag, therefore fewer does would be killed.
The PGC is facing some tough questions, just as it has been for years. The first is whether the commission’s role to serve the interests of hunters, farmers and landowners, the general public, or the state’s forest habitat, or a combination of all these? It’s probably a combination, but then they have to decide on who should be their first priority. Being a PGC commissioner is a thankless job that I wouldn’t take if it paid big bucks (pun intended). Last I checked it didn’t.
There are those who will argue, and commissioner Boop is one of them, that, if changes aren’t made, Pennsylvania will lose its decades-old deer hunting tradition. Truth be told, we’re already well on the way. If someone were to walk around the big woods of our northern tier on the first day of the firearms season they’d find a lot of hunting cabins without anyone in them. Restaurants, bars, grocery stores, gas stations, motels, sporting goods stores and other businesses that used to depend on deer hunters now depend more on snowmobilers, turkey hunters and trout fishermen. Deer season just isn’t the big deal that it used to be.
I frankly don’t see that changing much. We are going to continue to lose hunters over the long haul no matter what we do about deer management. It’s simply a fact of life. However, there are those that will argue strongly that if the current deer management program is not changed, things will be a lot worse.
-- E-mail comments to jdsteese@yahoo.com.
