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Sunday, April 06, 2003

By Ben Moyer

Forget Elmer Fudd. Unlike the buffoonish cartoon stereotype hunter, Pennsylvania's deer hunters have shown themselves to be careful, adaptable and generally effective in the woods.

	Chart Deer Harvest 2002

All the irrefutable evidence is in the numbers from the 2002 season. Hunters tagged 517,529 whitetails, more than 350,000 of which were antlerless deer, in a state that desperately needs to balance deer with other aspects of the landscape.

"As deer managers, we are excited about the progress hunters have helped us make in beginning to balance deer populations," said Gary Alt, chief of the Pennsylvania Game Commission's Deer Management Section.

"And based upon comments we have been receiving from hunters at sports shows, via e-mail and through the mail, they're equally excited about the new approach the Game Commission has employed to manage deer. Substantial progress has been made and our deer management effort is becoming more effective."

The new approach Alt cites included antler restrictions and the state's second year of concurrent hunting for bucks and does. Antler restrictions, under which bucks with fewer than three points to one antler were protected (four points in most of Western Pennsylvania), caused more anxiety before the season than a Steelers quarterback controversy.

Critics claimed that hunters would "shoot first and look later" and that the woods would be full of illegal bucks left there by hunters who could not, or would not, count points before pulling the trigger. The Game Commission had predicted that mistake kills would total between 5,000 and 10,000. But only 2,096 kills of illegal bucks occurred, and Game Commission officers determined that all but 29 of those were understandable mistakes given the circumstances. Of course, there were other small bucks killed that were not reported or never found, but there clearly was no wholesale destruction of younger bucks as some predicted.

"Our research indicates that hunters did an excellent job of identifying their bucks as legal game before pulling the trigger or drawing their arrow," Alt said.

"Further, the number of mistake kills reported statewide was lower than anticipated, which indicates higher hunter compliance rate with the new regulation. I am very confident that hunters will see the benefits of their efforts next year and in years to come."

Meanwhile, hunters took 165,416 legal bucks that did meet the antler restriction standard, about 40,000 fewer bucks than biologists say would have been killed under the old 3-inch spike minimum. Those 40,000 bucks, according to Alt, will have a chance to survive another year, develop in body size and antler growth, and intensify the competition for breeding rights with does next fall, improving the breeding ecology and overall health of the herds.

Most importantly, hunters accomplished this re-shaping of the state's deer herd while also compiling the safest deer season on record.

Statewide there were 12 hunting accidents during the firearms deer seasons, including one fatality. Hunting accidents have declined by 80 percent since hunter education training began in Pennsylvania in 1959.

Put 900,000 participants of any pursuit, from gardeners to golfers, outside on the same day and random probability dictates there will be accidents.

The fact that a legion of hunters with firearms can traverse just about every municipality in the state and have so few accidents is a tribute to education, and to the antler restrictions themselves, which required closer scrutiny before shooting.

"While even one shooting incident is one too many, we are pleased that hunters continue to improve their safety record," Game Commission executive director Vern Ross said.

Society will need safe, effective deer hunters in the years ahead, as the problem of managing deer populations across an ever more complex landscape grows more urgent. The 2002 deer season shows we still have a capable corps of hunters to carry on that trend.

The following are the number of antler and antlerless deer harvested by hunters in Western Pennsylvania counties in 2002.