A friend of mine sent me a PM asking how long it would take for the herd at Kinzua to be reduced to next to nothing based on the previous harvest rates and high predation. Since it was an interesting question and his PM was disabled I decided to post the answer for all to see.

The 2004 harvest reduced the OWDD from 24.7 DPSM to 14.4 DPSM which is a decrease of over 10 DPSM in just one year. Therefore ,if hunters harvested the same number of deer in 2005 and 2006 , as they did in 2004 their would be few if any deer remaining. But, in 2005 they reduced the number of DMAP tags and the harvest only reduced the herd by 1 DPSM. At that rate it would take 13 years to reduce the herd to next to nothing.

When Alt was promoting his plan he said herd reduction combined with ARs would increase breeding rates and shorten the breeding period and increase recruitment because so many fawns would be born with in a short time period. The results from Kinzua shows the exact opposite is true. The percentage of fawns in the preseason herd dropped from 47% in 2001, to 25% in 2004 and then increased to 34% in 2005,which is still considerably below the state average of 44%.

Therefore, based on the results from Kinzua , it is obvious that the herd was not above the MSY carrying capacity of the habitat when they had 27 DPSM. Cutting the herd from 27 DPSM in 2002 to 14 DPSM in 2005 effectively doubled the amount of food available per deer, yet fawn recruitment dropped from 41% in 2002 to 34% in 2005.