ORIGINAL: bluebird2
The reason there aren’t more deer in those areas today is simply that hunters demanded more deer then the habitat could sustain for long the habitat became so degraded it couldn’t support many deer. Thus the deer population in some of those areas crashed and is only slowly starting to recover the past year or two
That simply is not true. In WMU 2G where the herd has been reduced the most,was at it's goal DD in 1999 before the current plan was implemented Despited the fact that the herd was at its goal of 15 DPSM in 1999 the herd was reduced to 8-9 DPSM in 2008 and the forest health was still rated as poor. The simple fact is that the herd in 2G has been below the MSY carrying capacity of the habitat since 1980.
You have no idea what has really happened. Reality isn’t written in what you are reading, but it is evident to those of us that have spent decades living in the units and studying what has been occurring. You have no idea has been occurring because you have not set one foot on any 2G soil in decades.
The fact is the deer populations in unit 2G have been far below what they could have been, if had hunters allowed proper deer management decades ago, for a long time. The deer populations in unit have been rising and declining based on the environmental conditions for decades but generally slowly declining.
Then following the back to back harsh winters of 2002/2003 and 2003/2004 the deer populations crashed because of having two years of very few surviving fawns. That crash though really had little to do with the deer herd numbers at the time of those hard winters. That crash could only have been avoided if the deer populations had been reduced enough long before those hard winters so the winter grounds habitat could have sustained the over wintering deer in a healthy condition.
The fact is that deer populations in the northern tier and mountainous regions of the state are always going to be influenced and partially controlled by the winter and other environmental conditions. No one can change that fact even though we could support a lot more deer if we control the deer populations enough to allow the habitat to recover. Once the habitat recovers the deer numbers will also improve. If the habitat doesn’t recover there will never be more deer for more then short term periods of ideal environmental conditions.
R.S. Bodenhorn