ORIGINAL: bluebird2
Based on that alone shouldn’t a reasonable person be starting to recognize that fewer license and low antler less harvests hasn’t worked to build higher deer numbers? It should also be pretty obvious that the line about it only being about money must be purely horse-puckey.
But any reasonable person would also recognize that when harvests exceed recruitment ,it takes fewer antlerless tags and lower harvests to continue to reduce the herd. That is exactly what happened in 2G and it is why 2G has the lowest harvest rates in the state even though it is the one WMU where the PGC has been successful in reducing the herd to less than 10 DPSM. even with the reduced allocations in 2007 the harvest still reduced the herd by 23% in 2g.
There is no question that the deer mortality exceeded the fawn recruitment in the any location where the deer populations declined.
The problem with you and many others understanding deer management though is in the fact that you don’t seem to recognize the fact that many things besides hunters and the number of deer shot can seriously affect that fawn recruitment. The fact that unit 2G has had both declining antler less allocations and deer harvests over the past twenty years should lead any thinking person toward the conclusion that something besides deer harvests is causing the decline in fawn recruitment that it can’t keep up with even the ever declining deer harvests.
That fact that the deer numbers keep declining even while hunters keep harvesting fewer deer leads me to believe that the fawn recruitment has been declining due to the changes in any number of the environmental factors. The first thing that becomes suspect in the declining fawn recruitment has to be the habitat. Since the deer were over protected in that unit for so long anyone who has the eyes to see and recognize poor habitat can clearly see that the habitat is so poor it can’t support many deer.
Next a reasonable person would have to look at the affects that harsh winters have been shown to have on fawn survival rates. We know that as many as 93% of the fawns have been shown to die from nutritional stress when their mothers didn’t get enough food through both the winter and spring.
A reasonable person would also suspect and even know that fawn predation is an increased factor in the poor habitat areas of the state.
Put all of those factors together and anyone capable of logical thinking would surely recognize that in light of declining deer numbers while hunters are killing fewer of them, is a pretty clear indication that something other then hunter harvests is at play in such areas.
So basically the fact is that hunters were not the leading reason the deer numbers in unit 2G have declined.. The real reason for the decline is that the habitat couldn’t support more deer through winters of adverse conditions so nature reduced the deer populations with reduced fawn recruitment rates. That happens everywhere man fails to keep populations in balance with their food supply.
Don’t feel bad about not understanding that though, the anti-hunters don’t understand it either. That is just one more way you and the rest of the USP are more closely related their goals then you are the goals of objectives of hunters.
R.S. Bodenhorn