No I am not a biologist but I do have eyes and my own mind.Just because a bird watcher's org or the Ed Rendell run DCNR says something doesn't mean I'm going to roll over and accept it when my eyes show me otherwise.The forest I've been hunting for years is showing me you can have regen with a quality huntable deer herd.Was is that?Well it's not 10 dpsm with the dcnr saying more needs to be reduced!It's pretty bad when a common hunter like myself and others I talked to in our area can see the forest needs opened up for regen.This hot topic of deer reduction goes deeper then just saving the forest.I'm hoping to find time on labor day weekend to post some pics and prove my point.
I hardly know where to begin with this one. I guess your area doesn't have browse lines, which are well-documented in much of the state. The northcentral forest has been so severely overbrowsed by the deer that it will require deer populations of five to ten deer per square mile for quite a number of years before anything higher can be maintained without harming the forest. You don't have to be a member of Audubon Society to see that is fact.
What you want is fantasy. You want enough deer that it makes hunting easy, like it used to be when we had way too many deer. You can't have that and have healthy forests too. Your problem is that you refuse to believe facts presented to you when they contradict your preconceived opinion, that being that the blame commission has destroyed the deer herd because of ecoweenies. You can disregard the evidence that is provided by fenced plots, where the vegitation inside the plot grows well and outside it does not. You can disregard the testimony of competent biologists and forestry experts too. Believe what you seem to want to see with your own biased eyes. Believe also what those who hate the blame commission post, and hate those who tell you what you don't want to hear. You perceive Dr. Alt to be a danger to you because he told you the truth, but you didn't want to hear it.
The greatest danger to hunting in Pa. is not the efforts of DCNR and Audubon to have healthy forests. It is those like you who feel that the forests are there to provide you with an easy deer to shoot. If hunters prove themselves to be unable to control deer populations within ecologically sensible bounds, we will prove ourselves to be irrelevant and unnecessary to the majority of the public who could care less whether you hunt or don't hunt. Today, most of the non-hunting public sees us hunters as the only viable population control measure for wildlife. That could change, and hunting as we know it could be as extinct as the Dodo bird.
If you think hunting is really hard in Pa., you should stay here and never under any circumstances go to Maine. Some of us think the deer hunting is great there, and the deer density is far lower than in most of Pa.