On the decline




Did you get your buck or harvest a doe? How many deer did you see on opening day? Are you satisfied with current deer numbers? While many hunters are still successful and enjoy their time in the woods, some hunters are fed up with current deer numbers. As one hunter recently put it, “Who wants to brave the adverse conditions and sit in a tree all day just to watch chickadees?”


No matter what the deer population, there have always been unhappy hunters and they like to grumble. Factoring in today’s reduced deer numbers, a higher percentage of hunters are unhappy than what we had 25 years ago.
The numbers of Pennsylvania hunters are also dwindling, and that concerns more than a few people — hunters and Pennsylvania Game Commission personnel alike. We have approximately 300,000 fewer hunters today than what Pennsylvania had in 1982. That amounts to a lot of missing license dollars and many fewer hunters to move deer in the woods.
Hunting message boards and letters-to-the-editor printed in outdoor periodicals echo this concern. The writers look at the facts and often draw the same logical conclusion — Pennsylvania’s lower deer numbers are causing many people to quit hunting.
Keystone State deer management practices began to change drastically in 2000. October rifle antlerless seasons and concurrent buck and doe seasons began. As antlerless license allocations increased, the deer population was reduced to match its habitat across most of the state. Hunter participation, as measured by license sales, has also decreased since 2000.
During the past two weeks, I have received three e-mails commenting along these same lines. I have also talked with a number of hunters who share similar feelings and thinking about the situation. If one hears or reads the same story over and over again, it reinforces the idea and tends to solidify the concept in one’s brain. I will quote from two of the e-mails with slight editing for clarification.
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Hunter No. 1:“The number of hunters goes down each year and deer reduction is the number one cause. I sometimes walk the woods and feel like it’s useless. The once present anticipation that anything could happen at any time is now replaced with a ‘what’s the use’ attitude. I’m sure young hunters are much worse than I and are heading to the malls rather than the woods. Who can blame them? Another generation or two and hunting will be a distant memory.
“The absolute number one thing the PGC has going for it and the only thing that can bring back the hunters is the whitetail deer. As deer numbers go down, so will the number of hunters.”
Hunter No. 2:“Now with what the Game Commission has done to the deer population you are not only losing a great number of nonresident hunters, but you are also beginning to lose your resident hunters and your future hunters. Not because they do not want to hunt, but because of the lack of seeing deer. I know of at least eight different young hunters who
have given the sport up out of sheer boredom. Why you may ask? Well because they will spend eight hours in the woods cold and tired and not see a deer all day.”
These e-mail authors, both good well-meaning sportsmen, are guilty of a common error — seeing a correlation and turning it into a fact. Fact 1: deer numbers have been reduced. Fact 2: hunting license sales are down. Just because these two numbers are facts, and happen to positively correlate with one another, does not necessarily mean that one has caused the other.
I can hear the groans from some of you about now. Of course, one caused the other. How stupid do you think we are?
Similar to most other hunters, I like to see deer when I am deer hunting. However, unlike some hunters, I recognize that some sacrifice is necessary on my part to align the deer herd with its deteriorated habitat. Are there hunters who have quit because of lower deer numbers? I am sure that there are a few.
Did the eight young people to whom Hunter No. 2 referred really quit hunting because they did not see enough deer or were there other interests that conflicted with hunting? How many deer are enough? If these hunters saw only two deer any given day and quit because of that, would they still be hunting if the PGC doubled the deer population across the state, making it more likely that they would see four deer? Does Hunter No. 2 really think that these individuals would still be hunting if that were the case?
An excellent article — “Fewer Deer & Fewer Hunters: Are They Related?” — found in the December 2009 issue of Pennsylvania Game News, sheds some light on deer numbers, hunter numbers and correlations. I am going to touch on the article’s main points here, but the entire article is a “must read” for all deer hunters.
According to PGC Deer & Elk Section Chief Chris Rosenberry, who authored the article, Pennsylvania’s buck harvest increased from 122,000 to 194,000 between 1982 and 1999. Some refer to this as the “golden age” of deer hunting. During that same time period, hunter success more than doubled. Higher deer populations make for happy hunters and that equals more license sales, right?
It is logical but, during that 17-year period, exactly the opposite occurred (See Table 1). As the buck harvest and the hunter success rate increased, license sales went down. License buyers dropped from over 1,300,000 in 1982, to 1,150,000 in 1999. Should hunters now conclude that higher buck harvests caused there to be fewer licenses sold? Of course not, but it is just as unscientific to conclude that today’s reduced numbers are causing the decline in hunting.
“Back in 1999, if someone had used information on hunter declines from 1982 to 1999 to forecast hunting license sales in 2008, they would have predicted sales of about 935,000,” Rosenberry wrote. “In reality, 926,000 hunting licenses were sold. What this indicates is that hunter numbers have declined at a steady and predictable rate for the past 28 years. Changes in the deer management program have not helped, or hurt, hunting license sales.”
Rosenberry used graphs to illustrate the main points of his article. They clearly show a decline in license sales between 1982 and 1999, even as harvest numbers increased. Another graph shows predicted license sales as compared to actual sales.
A third graph (Table 2) compares national hunting license sales to Pennsylvania’s license sales. From 1982 to 2008, Pennsylvania license sales have dropped at a slower rate than the average rate of all of the other states combined. If lower deer numbers are the problem, should not Pennsylvania license sales be decreasing at a faster rate?
A look to the future
If current trends continue, in another two years, Pennsylvania license sales will likely dip below 900,000 and, in 10 years, license sales will sink below 800,000. That dire prediction, clearly shown from the data, should give all hunters and any lovers of the outdoors reason to worry. Those who remain hunters will have to cough up more money in the form of increased license fees or face lower services. That means fewer game lands purchased, less habitat improvement, fewer law enforcement officers, no biological studies and fewer pheasants stocked.
I vote for increased license fees, but I might be in the minority.
Deer management seminar
The Penn State Chapter of Tau Phi Delta and the newly-formed Central Pennsylvania Branch of Quality Deer Management is sponsoring a seminar, to be held on Tuesday, covering the principles of Quality Deer Management and how to pattern individual bucks using trail cameras.
The seminar will be held in room 106 of the Forest Resource Building, on the Penn State Campus, and will run from 7:30 to 9 p.m. The public is invited to attend.
Mark Nale, who lives in the Bald Eagle Valley, is a member of the PA Outdoor Writers Association. He can be reached at [email protected]



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