ORIGINAL: Screamin Steel
If your concerns and fears were founded then the deer populations in the highly populated areas of the state, where most of our state’s hunters live and now hunt, should have declined after twenty years of unlimited antler less license and harvests. For the past twenty years hunters in those areas could legally harvest as many deer as they wanted to harvest using legal seasons and methods. But, the deer numbers didn’t decline after twenty years of unlimited harvests and instead they continued to increase to the point they had to have even longer season then any other areas of the state. The harvested there increased to where they are now two to five times as high as the areas of the state where harvests have been cut in an attempt to increase deer numbers. Even with longer seasons they couldn’t reduce the deer numbers so many of those areas also had to hire sharpshooter that go out at night and kill dozens of deer several times each month just to keep those populations manageable.
Apples to oranges, once again RSB. You know darn well the accessibility problems
directly responsible for those deer problems and the failure of hunters to adequately control them. Hunt them on this twenty acres, they run to those twenty owned by the birdwatcher with the posted signs. Itis the same story in metropollitan and suburban areas everywhere. So often even with a sizable state park or other area open to hunting, yet surounded by residential areas, the pressure just drives them to a safe sanctuary nearby and then they blame the hunters for not killing enough deer where it is needed. Give those same hunters access to a large area with no safe sanctuaries nearby and reasonable access, and harvest is only dictated by the traditional factors. So why are we then managing vast regions of public land, the way we manage deer in suburban areas? Just another testament of the pathetic one size fits all deer plan we had forced down our throats. Thanks for outlining it.
I agree with this post 100%. Over the past few decades I watched all of the properties that I used to hunt here in Berks County dissappear due to development. I could throw rocks at the deer here in my development (a month ago there was one standing on the sidewalkat the front door), but huntable land is dissappearing at an alarming rate. So now I have to spend more time looking for places to hunt that have decent deer population. And when I find an area that looks good, Ikeep running into other hunters who are doing the same thing - scouting out new areas only to find too many hunters when the season begins.