What do you mean what happened to Pennsylvania?

Even though Pennsylvania has over protected it’s deer herd to the point the habitat was damaged and the deer population crashed in many areas it is still a national leader in the both deer populations and deer harvests.
The only reason Pennsylvania doesn’t have a higher hunter success rate is because of the fact Pennsylvania still has WAY more hunters competing for the deer then most other states.

The number of resident hunters for those three states has just been posted along with the harvests for each of those states. But, if you are going to look at hunter success rates you also have to understand that if Pennsylvania had as few hunters as those other states there would be a lot more deer per hunter and of course the hunter success rate would improve.

I am going to post the number of hunters and the deer harvests for each of those states in per square mile of land mass data so everyone can see just how many more hunters and deer harvested Pennsylvania actually has.

State………………….Hunters/sq. mile……………….Deer harvest/sq. mile
Pa……………………….20.8.…………… ………………7.49
Va……………………….8.9.……………⠀¦â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦.6.41
NY……………………..10.4.……………†¦â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦.4.72

As you can see Penna. Not only leads the three in hunters but also in deer harvests.

Now lets put the hunter success rates into some comparable perspective. Let’s look at the success rates of those other states if you were to put all of Pennsylvania’s hunters in there competing to get the same deer harvest as they had last year.

Last year the Penna. Hunters had a 36% success rate.

The Virginia hunter success rate, last year, was 72%. But if you were to put all of Penna’s hunters there to get that same harvest the success rate would have only been 27%.

New York hunters had a 45% success rate, but if all of Pa’s hunters had been there the success rate would only have been 24%.

So, based on the real apples to apples comparisons Pennsylvania does still have one of the best deer state’s in the nation. Pennsylvania just has more hunters competing for all of it’s deer and that means not everyone can get a deer every year.

It is also true that many areas of Pennsylvania once had more deer then are present today. 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.

There is nothing wrong with the hunting in Pennsylvania other then the Commission spent way too many years listening to hunter demands instead of the information the deer and their habitat were providing. Fortunately that has started to change and we have a brighter future for both the deer and deer hunter ahead.

R.S. Bodenhorn