You seem to think deer need acorns to survive.Presently only about 40% of Pa's forests are oak/hickory.Many areas of Pa never had an oak tree and never willMast is good but it can't be relied upon.Deer need high quality browse.Black birch is not a highly prefered browse species.Much of any new oak regeneration comes from stump sprouts after a cut.Problem is,until recently they never made it past the deer unless they were fenced off.Early succession forests are good for deer and a variety of game animals,including bear.They're also good for turkeys because they provide safe nesting sites.

Surely you aren't suggesting that a mature forest is ideal deer habitat?

I am not suggesting mature forests are ideal habit, I am stating it. You seem to know a lot about preferred browsing species, did you take a poll from the deer in your area? The biologists are always falling back on what was "natural" before the Europeans came to Pa. and destroyed the balance. A mature forest is what they are talking about. I never read about Indians logging off Pa. forests. Deer do not need acorns to survive, but it helps. It is the prefered food of deer, period. They will browse on laurel even after a morning of feeding on acorns. It may be a digestion thing, I do not know. There is not enough done after logging to repair what has been done to the forest. Planting a couple of apple trees or letting the logging companies replace hardwoods trees with pine seedlings is a joke. I don't know the number, but the SGL behind Cabelas in Hamburg has small plots of hybrid chestnut trees planted there. Go pick up as many as you want, nothing eats them, or maybe.....there is no deer to eat them?

Mature forests are far from ideal habitat.Deer need high quality prefered browse to sustain themselves through winter.Mast crops can be very spotty and inconsistant.On top of that,they only provide a food source for a brief period of time throught the year.

Yes,as a matter of fact,I have taken a poll of sort from the deer in this part of the state.Every year,I work side by side with foresters from PSU,DCNR nad the US FOREST SERVICE evaluating the effects of browsing.We set up miles of transect lines and do pellet counts every 100 feet along the lines and every 200 feet we evaluate what's growing in the plots.In doing so,we find out what prefered species are growing,what non-prefered species are growing and how the deer are impacting them.If there's no prefered species growing and the non-prefered species are being browsed we monitor to what extent that's occuring.Once the prefered species diappear to the point where the ono-prefered species are being browsed down or hedged,it's a sure indication that you have too mnay deer,regardless of the number.

Deer are picky eaters.they eat the more prefered species first.Those prefered species have been documented for years.In fact,many species such as hobblebush,trillium,azalia have been practically wiped out but are starting to come back.Deer will hit the more prefered species first,depending on the area.For years,it was almost impossible to see an oak stump sprout make it past the deer.Last year,I walked through a 70 acre exclosure a few miles from my house.It was a shelterwood cut designed to get some advanced oak regeneration occuring.Three years ago,it was loaded with young oak seedlings.Three deer got in and completely wiped out the oak regeneration with the exception of some stump sprouts that had a head start.These stump sprout all had a distict browse line around them.I took R.S.B there and he took some good pistures,maybe he'll post them.The red maple that was in there hardly got touched because the deer keyed in on the more prefered species first

Acorns alone will not sustain a deer herd.Heck,only about 40% of Pa's forests contain oak.Each deer needs between 3-5 lbs of browse a day to make it through winter.If there's too many deer,they quickly wipe out that prefered regeneration and inasive species take over.This is exactly what happened accross the northern tier of Pa.Now,we're faced with poor habitat that can't suppost large numbers of deer.Once the habitat gets to this point,it takes far less deer to continually impact it.If deer don't have high quality browse,they loose weight over winter.Once a doe loses 20-25% of her boidy weight,she stands a very good chance have having her fawns die at birth or shorty there after.This effects the future population.They key to having decent deer populations is having high quality habitat.Mature forests with nothing but ferns and non-prefered species is some of the worst deer habitat there is and you shouldn't expect to see many deer.

We have far more deer now than when the indians were trying to chase deer around.

If deer are eating laurel,they're extremely stressed.They simply don't eat it unless they have no other choise.

There's tons of information on deer and the effects they have on the habita.Spend some time googling.Punch is overbrowsing by deer,prefered and non prefered browse species of deer.Punch in hobble bush+whitetail deer and see what you find.

What I will find is a lot of information that does not pertain to the area I hunt. Everything you write sounds like you copied it right out of a book. I don't hunt in Potter or Pike county and we have lot of oak and laurel here in the middle of the state. Next you will be trying to tell me that laurel is detrimental to the ecosystem. Back when there was too many deer in the area I hunt, it was common to get a doe over 100 pounds. Some of the bucks had awesome racks on them. That is genetics at work. Now it is really rare to see a big racked buck on that game lands. Nobody gave a thought to what the liberal hunting was doing to the genetics of the deer. Yes, I know, I hear the stories too about how the deer taken are getting bigger. I hear it at the range all the time, but every one of them admits their club plants superfood or throws out minerals or hormones and God knows what else. Usually none of them took the big deer on open land, they use SLG to kill doe.
As long as the commission uses a "one size fits all" plan for the whole state, it will always be a failure.

None of that came from a book and what applies in the northern part of the state will also aplly to the central part of the state.Yes,mountain laurel is detrimental.It shades out desireable species that actually feed deer and other wildlife.I don't hunt in Potter or pike county either.The majority of my time is spent in Clearfield county and elk county but I also hunt bear in Center county as well as hitting Cameron county,Wyoming county and Jefferson county.The habitat where we bear hunt in Center county is some of the worst deer habitat around.

Nutrition and well fed deer is what makes deer bigger.There is no doubt that larger bucks are being taken on the public lands in this part of the state.If you have a fax machine,I can send you a picture of a truck load of bucks,taken on the last thursday of the 2008 season on public land in 2G.If you think it's fake,I'll also send you the phone number from taxidermist where the picture was taken.This guy mounts between 300-400 bucks a year.Prior to ar ne was lucky to do 200 and maybe 1 or 2 would have 20+inch spreads.Now we gets in over 50 a year that have spreads that big.

There was no one size fits all plan.Allocations,and seasons lengths have all been adjusted according to the wmu's

For the record,I don't even know of a club that plants food plots or practices any type of QDM around here.

You don't have the slightest idea of what you are talking about. Laurel detrimental to the forest. No wonder nobody will listen to the commission. When they actually do spend money on habitat improvement, one of the first things done is tons of lime is brought in. Over half the plants you would like to see won't even grow on the tops and sides of these mountains. What do you want to do, level the woods every 10 years to stop the shading affect? I don't need pictures from you showing big deer from the northern regions. I have plenty of old Game News from the 60s to look at. Over 20 years ago I hunted Maryland down along route 15 when there was way too many deer. A gypsy moth kill wiped out most of the big trees and it turned into a jungle in 2 years. With all those deer there it stayed that way. That is just the way it is with big trees shading out the understory. You would have to constantly knock down the bigger trees to maintain your perfect forest.

LOL.I don't know what I'm talking about?You haven't made one post that makes any sense at all.Laurel is absolutely worthless except for cover but that overshadows the fact that it outcompetes and shades out more beneficial species.Lime treatments have been tried by both DCNR and the US forest service and found to do very little.It has been shown to to help certain species such as sugar maple but it does nothing for oak.Oak grows just fine in acidic soils.There were several area limed by Dr William Sharp in Moshannon state forest.I've walked through those areas and the adgacent areas that were never limed twice with the district forester from Moshannon state forest.There is lliterally no difference except for the rate at which the bvracken ferns grew.What makes a difference is fencing the deer out.You erect a fence and low and behold the oak regenerates like crazy.The soil and the rain fall are the same inside the fences as outside.

By the way,some of the best regeneration that's occuring is on the tops of the mountains.Deer are forced off the higher elevations during bad winters(when most of the browsing damage occurs)and into the lower elevations.Because of this,there's often no need to fence those cuts and the area regenerates just fine.

I've also seen areas turn into a jungle after the overstory is revoved,despite the fact that there were loads of deer.What you faill to understand is that deer don't eat just anything.Not all thick areas are good habitat.If the area regenerated in non-prefered species because the deer cleaned out everything prefered,the habitat will be in worse shape than it was to begin with.That's exactly what happens when you have too many deer.In 1985 a huge tornado ripped through Moshannon state forest.The deer herd was large to begin with but then it exploded.Some of that area was too thick to walk through but the deer cleaned out everything of value.Today,it's lousy habitat with a low deer density.