PA DEER HUNTERS???????????

[Steve Crowl]

Knock on wood I saw deer every trip to the woods ... some state land and some private. No bucks close enough for my poor shooting skills.  

[wollelybugger]

Cut out doe season for a couple of years and it would be a start. The Game com. is still trying to tell us that the deer are there and we aren't getting off the road. LOL. I have seen all the deer on private land that was posted and the owner spends a lot of time there to kick people off. He doesn't allow doe hunting and there are deer there. It is nice to see them. I will hit the game lands for bear season and spring gobbler. The sad part is the agency that is supposed to protect the deer was responsible for eliminating one of the largest deer populations in the United States. I wonder why the hunting license numbers are down. I wonder why the younger hunters don't want to stand in the cold all day and not see anything. The game com. started it and now they are going to have to figure out how to survive. Combine the fish com. and the game com. and save some money. We don't need two agency's doing the same thing.

[Earl Jeff]

Well that ends it for me over thirty days on stand and one deer within bow range saw deer a whole two other times I think I'll sleep in tomorrow. RIP.  :(

[ultrasweet]

I have to give it one last chance. If anyone is heading out tomorrow, I wish you good luck.

[blktail]

"Combine the fish com. and the game com. and save some money.We don't need two agency's doing the same thing."

  Couldn't have said it better myself my friend.

[Jim Picarelli]

Originally posted by danseitz:
Not to be nasty but any of you Pennsy guys who fell all over yourselves to hug Gary Alt need to appologize to the rest of us. It truly is a shame what the Pa Game Commision did to deer hunting on public land. I have been out in Ohio the last few years trying to find a place with some deer. Sad.

I'm not an Alt fan nor do I favor the restrictions but to be fair,the only thing the PGC did was sell the tags...it was the hunters filled them and killed loads of deer,and now they're bitchin

[Jim Picarelli]

Originally posted by Jim Picarelli:
 

Originally posted by danseitz:
Not to be nasty but any of you Pennsy guys who fell all over yourselves to hug Gary Alt need to appologize to the rest of us. It truly is a shame what the Pa Game Commision did to deer hunting on public land. I have been out in Ohio the last few years trying to find a place with some deer. Sad.

I'm not an Alt fan nor do I favor the restrictions but to be fair,the only thing the PGC did was sell the tags...it was the hunters filled them and killed loads of deer,and now they're bitchin.But on a good note...I did take a nice 8pt yesterday morning [/b]

[Tioga]

I'm not an Alt fan nor do I favor the restrictions but to be fair,the only thing the PGC did was sell the tags...it was the hunters filled them and killed loads of deer,and now they're bitchin  

Oh those terrible hunters.    :rolleyes:   First we get blamed for not killing enough does decade after decade. Now we get blamed for killing to many.  

[Jim Picarelli]

...

[Jim Picarelli]

Not terrible hunters at all. Pa. hunters are very good at what they do(the kill statistics prove that),and I'm proud to be a Pa. hunter

[Jim Picarelli]

Originally posted by Jim Picarelli:
Not terrible hunters at all. Pa. hunters are very good at what they do(the yearly kill statistics prove that),and I'm proud to be a Pa. hunter

[Tioga]

I think you missed my point Jim. I'm not saying Pa hunters are terrible hunters. I was being sarcastic. So I'll try it once again.

  In the past, Pa hunters were accused of not allowing the PGC to harvest the number of deer that some folks, like Roger Latham, wanted. So for decade after decade we were accused of allowing the deer herd to grow to the point where they were supposedly damaging the forests and themselves. But somehow, during the decade after decade of forest destruction, we ended up with supposedly the biggest herd we ever had in 2002.  :rolleyes:  

  Nowadays, we get the blame for killing to many deer simply because we bought the tags and used them.

  I'll say it again....hunters are not a management program. They are a management tool.

[Jim Picarelli]

Couldn't agree with ya more,Tioga  

[Tioga]

Glad to hear that Jim. I follow the antics over on the Greenie HPA board, and I'm about sick and tired of us hunters getting the blame. In my eyes, it all started with a statewide messege by a snake oil salesman named Gary Alt, who touted a program THAT STARTED OUT WITH A FLAWED POPULATION model. Whether it was flawed by design is anybodies guess. The biologist that created this model moved out of state soon after, leaving another biologist to clean up the mess. Almost magically, the PGC abandoned the population estimation aspect and moved on to habitat assesment surveys in leiu of estimating the deer numbers.

  We hunters followed the science. We are guilty of that and nothing more. In other words, they fed us a line of Eco-Terrorist, tree hugging, bio-freak crap, and we spooned it down.

And here we are.        

Gary Alt, he's our man
He came to town, and sold his plan
With visions of racks, like the one he waved
We took the bait, the herd would be saved
He said bucks would be bigger, there'd be more to kill
Up there yonder, up on the hill

Our bowhunting org, yelled FOLLOW THE SCIENCE!
And now we have crossbows, that are in compliance
Now here we set, in deerless despair
The plan needs tweaking, it needs urgent repair

With embryo counts, dropping each year
And negative browse impact surveys, yelled in our ears
"Soon" they say, relief will come
Will it be before, there's hunters none?

[Tioga]

BTW Jim....congrats on that 8 pointer.  

[Downwind Lefty]

This whole situation I find very confusing and frustrating. I've hunted in Pa for 35 years, state land for the first 25 years and primarily private the past 10. I currently have a cabin and small piece of property (25 ac) that I own and have permission to hunt the adjacent 250 acres my buddies family has owned for 100 years.

We have fields, streams, hardwoods, pines, flatland, ravines, grapevines, thickets, mountain tops, feed patches etc, perfect terrain. We also border state game lands.

We take a few does each year but overall less than 1/2 dozen for all that hunt there. This property in the "glory years" held tons of deer and was an absolute great time to hunt on.

Now we see some does and a few bucks but nothing great. I'm there every weekend and have seen 2 small 6 points, a few forks and spikes - mostly in the fields and usually a couple does each trip afield.

We do a lot of spotlighting and the route that used to show a hundred or more deer is lucky to show 20 now.

The interesting thing is no one hunts anymore. Turkey season we had zero cars parked on the state game lands. Deer rifle season you see very few people and barely ever hear any shooting. So all the deer are NOT being shot now. So why aren't we seeing any???

Pa used to be a great time, now there isn't enough action to keep a seasoned hunter entertained less than a child. A great thing has taken a huge hit in my opinion.

I'd prefer to see more deer. I'd prefer to determine what I consider a "trophy". I don't see any more "trophy" bucks today than I saw 15 years ago - but I see a fraction of the game.

Opening day of rifle season, we used to have a dozen or more guys at the cabin and we had a GREAT time. Now it's just my father-in-law and me. We still have a great time, but we also miss the good ol' days.

Something needs to be done or support will continue to dwindle. Hunters put a lot of $ into the economy and it's getting reduced year over year. Not to mention it's hard to pass along the heritage if there's no one there to pass it along to.

Thank you Mr. Alt.

[Tioga]

The interesting thing is no one hunts anymore. Turkey season we had zero cars parked on the state game lands. Deer rifle season you see very few people and barely ever hear any shooting. So all the deer are NOT being shot now. So why aren't we seeing any???
 

I'd say predators. Around here, we started seeing some fawns in mid July. By the end of August, our fawn sightings in the deep woods went to zero. All told, I've seen one single fawn during the entire archery season.

  Considering that we went into the herd reduction program with a flawed population model which showed that we had more deer then we actually had, and that the PGC was handing out doe tags like candy to kids, I think our herd was taken down quickly and drastically the first few years of this program. I don't know where your cabin is, but in my neck of the woods the excessively hard winters of 2003 and 2004 were hard on the deer which resulted in next to no fawn recruitment during the subsequent summers. The does made it through the winter, but had aborted or absorbed their fetuses. These events brought our herd numbers down to the point where predators could now control our herd for the most part. It took the PGC two more years to back off on doe tag allocations in 2G after these hard winters, and that further aggravated the trouble.

  In my area, and a local WCO agrees with me, is that the deer numbers were taken down so low that the deer population is being currently controled by more predators than hunters with doe tags.

  As for hunter numbers, this bow season I've seen the lowest number of hunters on SGL 208 and 64 than I've seen in the last 20 years. They were non-existant. Might've been the economy, but I think it's the lack of deer.

[Downwind Lefty]

Tioga - I agree with the predators. We're now seeing many more bears than we ever have before. I'm sure they're impacting the population. Btw, my cabin is in Bedford county near a tiny town called Artemas.

I also agree with the tags - I remember the first two seasons they allowed does to be taken during the regular firearms season, it sounded like a war!

I don't have the answer, but I sure hope someone does.

[Jeff Mccarthy]

There was a decent population of deer on the public lands ( Cambria and Blair Counties )prior to the implementation of the 2 week rifle doe season and now the 1 week inline muzzleloader season right in the middle of archery season. The deer population continues to decline with each year getting worse. The predators do take some deer but they have always been around to some extent. A deer can't outrun a bullet. I have nothing againt rifle hunting, I go when I've not had any achery success but my God, 2 weeks of ( It's brown, It's down ). There have always been a small percentage of those who break the law and take several extra deer. What the PGC has done with the liberal seasons is enabled everyone to go out and legally pound the heck out of the deer. Something has to change!!!

[Adirondack Bowman]

close the season for 3 to 5 years.