Deer guru wants increased harvest numbers

Pennsylvania's deer project leader Gary Alt: 'The bottom line is that we've been trying to raise more deer than the land can sustain'

By John McCoy
Charleston (W.Va) Daily Mail


Gary Alt offers some compelling arguments to decrease the number of deer across the country.

The man who altered the way Pennsylvanians hunt whitetail deer would like to see deer seasons nationwide undergo similar changes.

"The bottom line is that we've been trying to raise more deer than the land can sustain," said Gary Alt, the Pennsylvania Game Commission's deer project leader.

"If we step up and do the right thing now — which is to reduce deer numbers almost everywhere — we can be considered heroes instead of fools."

By "we," Alt means hunters and wildlife officials. He said both groups are responsible for the whitetail population problems present in so many areas today.

"Vocal hunters have dominated wildlife managers' plans since the early 1900s," he said. "The managers' willingness to bow to their wishes has skewed the way wildlife is managed."

Though other species also have been allowed to proliferate beyond the ecosystem's ability to support them, Alt said deer have done the most damage.

"Deer control what lives and dies in a forest ecosystem," he said. "Allowing their numbers to expand beyond what is biologically sustainable has been the biggest mistake in the history of wildlife management."

Seasonal changes

To combat that mistake in Pennsylvania, Alt has set up a series of seasons designed to trim the state's deer herd by ensuring that hunters kill more female deer than males.

"This fall, we hope to reduce our deer population by about 5 percent," he said.

“ Deer control what lives and dies in a forest ecosystem. Allowing their numbers to expand beyond what is biologically sustainable has been the biggest mistake in the history of wildlife management. ”
— Pennsylvania Game Commission's deer project leader Gary Alt

Other Pennsylvania wildlife officials have tried what Alt is attempting, but sportsmen have resisted the effort — first by refusing to kill enough antlerless deer, then by lobbying to have antlerless-deer harvest quotas reduced.

Alt countered the resistance by pushing for two radically different deer hunting seasons.

First, he asked that the state's one-day antlerless-deer season to be spread over 14 days, and that it coincide with the bucks-only season in late November and early December.

"When you restrict the antlerless season to just one day, it becomes very weather-dependent," he explained. "With it spread over two weeks, it's not likely to be affected by bad weather."

With the season less weather-dependent, Game Commission officials were able to reduce the number of antlerless-deer permits available to the public and still remain confident that enough antlerless deer would be killed to meet the agency's management goals.

"Another factor in the 14-day antlerless season is that we're giving hunters enough time to make sure they kill females," Alt said. "With the one-day season, they shot anything without antlers. A lot of the animals they killed were button bucks. Now they can take their time and make sure they take a doe instead of a buck."

The other new season — and arguably the more controversial of the two — is a mid-October season that also targets antlerless deer.

"I like to call it a 'pre-rut doe removal' season," Alt said. "It's an attempt to grow bigger and healthier deer, and bucks with bigger racks."

Easy logic

The rationale behind the season is simple.


An outspoken deer official says if hunters don't start killing more deer, some day sharpshooters will be hired to do the job.

"Bucks produce their biggest racks between the ages of 4 and 8," Alt explained. "But in Pennsylvania, because of the way our seasons were oriented toward buck hunting, we were removing 80 to 90 percent of our bucks before they had a chance to grow.

"By letting a large number of does live until after the buck season, and by killing most of the best bucks during the buck season, we were ensuring that a low number of small bucks — mostly yearlings — was mating with a large number of does. Sometimes the mating didn't get finished until January, and the subsequent fawn births were spread out over several weeks."

Fawns born late tended to be more susceptible to predators, less healthy and less able to compete with their earlier-born cousins. Alt believes that by removing about 100,000 does from the population with an early antlerless-deer season, some of the problems will be solved.

"We're trying to get more big bucks doing the mating," he said. "That should result in bigger and stronger fawns that are born in a more concentrated time frame and thus are less susceptible to predators."

Selling the idea

Getting his ideas across wasn't easy. To sell his proposed seasons to Pennsylvania's reluctant and politically active sportsmen, Alt traveled to every corner of the state and presented his ideas to more than 22,000 people in 61 sessions.

"The hunters became reasonable once I explained it to them," he said.

Back in April, the Game Commission voted to adopt Alt's ideas in time for the upcoming whitetail seasons. He believes the adoption has the potential to improve the public's perception of hunters and their impact on the environment.

"Hunters are less than 10 percent of the population," he said. "If we continue to cram an outmoded method of deer management down society's throat, one of these days society will take care of the problem by hiring sharpshooters, having refrigerated trucks on hand, and sending the venison to the market.


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"I've been pleading with hunters — let us manage the deer, or we'll lose our ability to hunt. If we can come down hard on deer in areas where they're overpopulated, we'll be leading the charge toward restoring the forests in Pennsylvania.

"We want to have the cameras rolling when we do. Society wants to know what you can do for them. Hunters will provide a free ecological service for the public. We'll document how we're bringing back the trees, the neotropical migrant birds, etc.

"That's our ticket to hunting in the future."