ORIGINAL: bluebird2
You aren't even close to being right. If RSB wanted to provide a factual representation of the antlerless harvests he would have provided the yearly antlerless allocations along with the yearly harvests , rather that using 5 year averages which tend to mask the correlation between the harvests and the decrease in the herd.
Even with the data RSB posted , it is clear that five years of high doe harvests resulted in lower harvests the next five years. How RSB can ignore that obvious correlation and accuse the deer management team of misleading the hunters is beyond me.
To further support my position, here is a quote from the PGC regarding the effects of the antlerless harvests.
To further deal with inadequate har vests, in 1988 the Commission imple mented the statewide “bonus deer program,” successfully piloted in the southeast special regulations area the previous year. For the first time hunters could take more than one deer per year. The agency allocated 679,300 antlerless licenses. Under the new program, unsold antlerless licenses were issued as “bonus tags” three weeks after license sales began – and the entire allocation was
issued. Since 1988, the agency in creased antlerless allocations, and hunter harvests in subsequent years not only stopped the growth of the herd on a statewide basis, but reduced it by about 15 percent as of winter, 1993-94.
So is RSB telling the truth or is the PGC telling the truth? Or, can't we believe either one?
Here is another interesting quote that shows RSB is just blowing smoke.
h – "Normally a deer herd expands in size by about 30 percent per year through reproduction. If losses are smaller than that figure, the size of the herd will increase. The annual antlered deer harvest accounts for only some 12 to 15 percent of the herd, and if the total population is to remain at a constant level, it is necessary to remove an additional 12 to 15 percent through antlerless harvests. Elimination of the antlerless season would produce an explosion in whitetails that would soon get out of hand." – Game Commission biologist Dale Sheffer, Report to PFSC in 6\80 PA Game News
All anyone wanting to know what the truth is would have to do is look a the data and colors on the maps I provided and then think it through with some rational thoughts.
The deer harvest history is what it is and there is no way for that data to do anything but provide the facts concerning when the highest antler less harvest actually did occur.
Those areas in red clearly show that the highest harvests occurred there between fifteen and twenty years ago. That isn’t a lie, it is a fact based on real data.
No matter how much you don’t like the data and no matter how much you wish it weren’t true that data clearly proves you are wrong about hunter harvests being the only, or even the most influential, factor controlling deer populations.
It is you who does the spinning. Explain to us just how providing real deer harvest data could be considered as spinning things. It is what it is and no one can change the facts it provides.
Your understanding and explanation of the forest growth history and levels of change for this part of the state were seriously lacking in realism too, but that is a matter for another thread and another time. Both DCE and BT Bowhunter had much more factual and realistic explanations for how the deer densities will change over relatively short time periods with an area.
R.S. Bodenhorn