The Mismanagement of the PA Deer Herd
09-27-2010, 01:45 PM
#31
Nontypical Buck
Thread Starter
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 3,879
Yes,DCNR blackmailed the PGC because they demanded less deer.It's no secret.It was actually posted on the first paragraph of their deer management plan.No one needed a phony conspiracy theorist to make more out of it than there was.Alot of groups supported the need to have less deer because that's exactly what was needed.
Would you please explain how our herd increased for 20 years from 1980 to 2000, when the habitat had been over browsed since 1930?
09-27-2010, 02:11 PM
#32
Nontypical Buck
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 2,262
The only ones that label Eveland's presentation as a phony conspiracy theory are those that were duped by Alt's prediction of doom and gloom if the herd was reduced to the previous DD goals. Now, even though his claims and predictions have been proven to be false ,guys like you and RSB are still defending a plan that resulted in the loss of over 200K deer hunters from 2000 to 2008 and produced the lowest buck harvests in over 40 years.
Would you please explain how our herd increased for 20 years from 1980 to 2000, when the habitat had been over browsed since 1930?
Would you please explain how our herd increased for 20 years from 1980 to 2000, when the habitat had been over browsed since 1930?
Deer are resilient and they can find food in some of the worst situations.That doesn't mean they are as healty as they can be and it doesn't mean that they aren't causing severe damage to the habitat.On top of that,with the exception of a few bad winters during that time period,the deer had an easy time because the winters were mild,allowing them to spread out and use more of the habitat.Also,in many areas(about 40% of pa)the deer rely very heavily on mast crops.Unfortunately,an oak/hickory forest is not renewable at the deer densities associated with the kinds of deer densities you demand.
09-27-2010, 02:43 PM
#33
Fork Horn
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Morgantown WV USA
Posts: 108
>Now prove that there are no areas in the state with 1 or 2 DPSM.
So if I claim there are lots of magical unicorns in PA it's fact until you prove there are not?
Why don't we invite Sir Evland here to show us the studies he spoke of. I am sure they are in the same file cabinet he keeps the drafts of the elk and bear management plan he wrote for the GC.
WV Gino
So if I claim there are lots of magical unicorns in PA it's fact until you prove there are not?
Why don't we invite Sir Evland here to show us the studies he spoke of. I am sure they are in the same file cabinet he keeps the drafts of the elk and bear management plan he wrote for the GC.
WV Gino
09-27-2010, 02:45 PM
#34
Nontypical Buck
Thread Starter
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 3,879
It still doesn't change the fact that it's been univerasally accepted by every expert that we had way too mnay deer for the habitat.It's easy to find the information and it's not debatable.We had too many deer and the habitat suffered greatly.You been waiting for some type of expert to agree with you but the guy you came up with has no credibility,which is relevent to the converstaion.
09-30-2010, 10:37 AM
#35
Giant Nontypical
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: PA.
Posts: 5,195
my grandfather owned that property long ago into johnson run.
if anyone listens too your crap ,GOOD LUCK TOO THEM.if anyone would like to listen to people that hunt this property and dont even see a deer or very few, drop me a pm and i will hook you up with some.
its all bunch of crap............
09-30-2010, 11:57 AM
#36
Nontypical Buck
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 2,262
douge,you just plain believe anything.read GINO post on what deer they see,1.7 for 4 days of hard hunting.
my grandfather owned that property long ago into johnson run.
if anyone listens too your crap ,GOOD LUCK TOO THEM.if anyone would like to listen to people that hunt this property and dont even see a deer or very few, drop me a pm and i will hook you up with some.
its all bunch of crap............
my grandfather owned that property long ago into johnson run.
if anyone listens too your crap ,GOOD LUCK TOO THEM.if anyone would like to listen to people that hunt this property and dont even see a deer or very few, drop me a pm and i will hook you up with some.
its all bunch of crap............
You reafirm what I've been saying for years,Once the dd gets close to 20 dpsm,people start saying that there's no deer.
09-30-2010, 02:07 PM
#37
Nontypical Buck
Thread Starter
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 3,879
You reafirm what I've been saying for years,Once the dd gets close to 20 dpsm,people start saying that there's no deer
09-30-2010, 02:10 PM
#38
Nontypical Buck
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 2,262
I can always count on you and Gino for a good laugh once in awhile. h the PGC was reducing the herd in 2G from 15 DPSM in 2000 to 8 DPSM by 2008,the West Branch Club allowed their herd to increase from 20 DPSM in 2005 to 24 DPSM in 2006. So the habitat in Cameron Co. that has been over browsed for 80 years was still capable of increasing the herd by 4 DPSM in just one year. How could that be possible when the habitat is controlling the herd in much of 2G?
09-30-2010, 04:07 PM
#40
Banned
Join Date: Sep 2010
Posts: 220
I'm sitting here, reading these posts, trying to understand what all the fighting is about. In the past 12 years, I have hunted steady from the first day of the season to the last.
I have hunted Jefferson, Elk, Clearfield, Indiana, Armstrong, Clarion, McKean, Warren, Bradford, Forrest, Clinton counties in that period of time.
One of my favorite hunting spots was a place they call Lolita - which is located in the Allegheny National forest.
My family traditionally hunted there for 70+ years.
Probably as long as there was a deer hunting season.
When my dad first started hunting - which was around 1952, he said you saw lot's of deer up there, but most of them were does and spikes and it was not legal to shoot spikes.
He told a story about how in 1954 or 55, when he was serving in the US Navy, he came home for hunting season and he was hunting with his family, when he got back to the vehicle at the end of the day, his dad asked him what he had saw and he said a bunch of does and one spike.
My grandpa said - why didn't you shoot, and my dad said because Spikes are not legal and my grandpa said - yes they are - they changed the rules this year.
I believe the place where they hunted was called Grundy's camp.
It was as far back into the woods as you were allowed to drive your car. There was a gate or a wire across the road.
50 years later, when I tried to get my dad to go back, he did once or twice, but it was on a Wednesday after the main hunters had already left. There is always one gang up there that comes from Vermont - you see them every year, around the same place and they always manage to get a deer. A guy that parks a camper beside the road next to the creek that always has a nice buck hanging from a tree and a couple of other campers along the road going towards the pines from Lolita towards Marionville through the forest.
In 2002 - you could easily see 20 deer in the woods before you ever got to that spot if you took the short cut through the woods through Clear Creek State Park, down to Heath Pump station and across the new bridge - across the Clarion River and then up over the hill on the new road to the woods.
After the DMAP permits - you don't see deer anymore.
After they put all the fences up - you see even less deer roaming around.
I loved hunting up around the Hallton Hilton, but the hills were too steep. I also liked hunting up in the Brockway Game Lands - Empire Ridge and Rock Shanty.
The problem is, there are no deer up around Brockway anymore.
2 deer per a square mile - they might as well be extinct.
If the deer herds up and you have a herd of 8 deer, that might be all the deer in any one particular township.
If you go up around Spring Creek Twp or Millstone, you can't walk that far in a week to be able to cover all that territory in any one township.
The PGC is more interested in growing timber, selling gas rights and raising Elk then it is in growing deer. The special interest groups is the ones that has the most money and screams the loudest.
By 2005 - a group of hunters that could have bought our hunting camp in Jefferson county and didn't, came back to Jefferson county on a Wednesday afternoon with a nice 5 point buck on the roof of their Jeep and told us that they were hunting in a hunting lodge near St Mary's and was hunting in a place in McKean county and that they shot the last buck in McKean county and that they were not going to go back there ever again.
This group consistently shot nice bucks at our camp for 30 years and they live in Sewickley Heights and they said they have more deer in their backyards then what we have in any of the northern counties.
For anyone to go on television, be interviewed in a magazine or tell a group of hunters that they need to come back to their traditional spots and that everything is better now - just 6 years later, would be the biggest lie's we have heard since Vietnam.
On top of Clearfield Mountain - you can still see for a mile beneath the tree canopy. On the sides of RT 322, from Clearfield towards SB Elliot, there are no deer to be found grazing on the green grass that grows along side the roads.
On Boone mountain - you no longer see a sea of Blaze Orange hunters going through the woods on opening day. All along Caledonia Pike - the camps are empty. Medix Run - no hunters because there are no deer.
The best thing the PGC did to pee in their own pot was when they gave away Elk licenses to be raffled off by The National Wild Turkey Federation and did not give any licenses to The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, who donated money to the PGC to build the wildlife viewing area near Windslow Hill. You no longer hear about the RMEF because they washed their hands of the whole situation and refuse to get involved anymore.
Their whole reason for helping was to get a foot in the door to get their hands on some Elk Tags so they could hunt trophy Elk in Pennsylvania. They could have bought elk and land and hunted cheaper then what it cost them to help the PGC.
Just go into any bar in the Northern counties and ask the residents where the deer are and they will tell you. The deer lives beside the houses between Kane and Marionville. By doing that, they are away from public hunting pressure - because you can't hunt beside a house. The have their choice of food to eat - both from peoples bird feeders, deer feeders, and from the plants in the gardens and the shrubbery.
When you go to southern Jefferson county and ask the same question, their answer would be that most of the deer are on posted property. The property owners acts as if the deer are theirs and they patrol their land and will have who ever trespasses arrested.
Our problem is - when hunters from the north gets disgusted, they either move south to where they can find one or two easy deer or they quit. If they quit, the PGC just sells more tags.
Each hunter that wants can pretty much get 3 tags in 2D - even though it has a 4 points antler restrictions for adult hunters - but kids can shoot anything with antlers and the parents just take them along so they can shoot more deer and then they just get the kids to tag them for them. The worst thing the PGC ever did was remove the age restriction and allow hunters to make their own deer tags out of a piece of paper and put their kids names on it and allow them to go back to shooting spikes and anything with less then 4 points to one side.
All it did was make the landowners close up more land to public hunting and make the deer on public lands even more scarce.
Gary Alt had two things in mind when he instituted his plan.
First was to get Pennsylvania into the same league as Colorado, where you have to compete for a deer tag and where you have an opportunity to hunt for trophy whitetail deer. We had very few trophy deer before the antler restrictions.
The second goal was to fill his pockets with as much money as quickly as possible and then split. Gary took as much graft and corruption as he could and then he retired, which was the goal of the PGC.
The biggest waste of money was when they closed the Game School near Brockway and moved it to Harrisburgh so it would be closer to the state capitol. When the Game School was located near Brockway - you had all kinds of deer because you had a whole team of potential game wardens on the property - patrolling the area.
Even down near Knoxdale at one time in SGL 31, they had a stone camp that was used to house a Game Warden in deer season, who patrolled the lines between the hunting preserve and the open for public areas in the Game Lands. Back then we had all kinds of deer.
Today, the game warden doesn't even get out of his truck anymore.
There is no money to be made in fines when there is no limit to the amount of deer that you can legally shoot in one season.
The Game Warden probably makes more revenue by fine's for people with loaded guns in their vehicles or leaning against their vehicles then he does from people illegally shooting more deer then they are entitled to.
A couple more years and we will all be going to a zoo to see a deer.
I have hunted Jefferson, Elk, Clearfield, Indiana, Armstrong, Clarion, McKean, Warren, Bradford, Forrest, Clinton counties in that period of time.
One of my favorite hunting spots was a place they call Lolita - which is located in the Allegheny National forest.
My family traditionally hunted there for 70+ years.
Probably as long as there was a deer hunting season.
When my dad first started hunting - which was around 1952, he said you saw lot's of deer up there, but most of them were does and spikes and it was not legal to shoot spikes.
He told a story about how in 1954 or 55, when he was serving in the US Navy, he came home for hunting season and he was hunting with his family, when he got back to the vehicle at the end of the day, his dad asked him what he had saw and he said a bunch of does and one spike.
My grandpa said - why didn't you shoot, and my dad said because Spikes are not legal and my grandpa said - yes they are - they changed the rules this year.
I believe the place where they hunted was called Grundy's camp.
It was as far back into the woods as you were allowed to drive your car. There was a gate or a wire across the road.
50 years later, when I tried to get my dad to go back, he did once or twice, but it was on a Wednesday after the main hunters had already left. There is always one gang up there that comes from Vermont - you see them every year, around the same place and they always manage to get a deer. A guy that parks a camper beside the road next to the creek that always has a nice buck hanging from a tree and a couple of other campers along the road going towards the pines from Lolita towards Marionville through the forest.
In 2002 - you could easily see 20 deer in the woods before you ever got to that spot if you took the short cut through the woods through Clear Creek State Park, down to Heath Pump station and across the new bridge - across the Clarion River and then up over the hill on the new road to the woods.
After the DMAP permits - you don't see deer anymore.
After they put all the fences up - you see even less deer roaming around.
I loved hunting up around the Hallton Hilton, but the hills were too steep. I also liked hunting up in the Brockway Game Lands - Empire Ridge and Rock Shanty.
The problem is, there are no deer up around Brockway anymore.
2 deer per a square mile - they might as well be extinct.
If the deer herds up and you have a herd of 8 deer, that might be all the deer in any one particular township.
If you go up around Spring Creek Twp or Millstone, you can't walk that far in a week to be able to cover all that territory in any one township.
The PGC is more interested in growing timber, selling gas rights and raising Elk then it is in growing deer. The special interest groups is the ones that has the most money and screams the loudest.
By 2005 - a group of hunters that could have bought our hunting camp in Jefferson county and didn't, came back to Jefferson county on a Wednesday afternoon with a nice 5 point buck on the roof of their Jeep and told us that they were hunting in a hunting lodge near St Mary's and was hunting in a place in McKean county and that they shot the last buck in McKean county and that they were not going to go back there ever again.
This group consistently shot nice bucks at our camp for 30 years and they live in Sewickley Heights and they said they have more deer in their backyards then what we have in any of the northern counties.
For anyone to go on television, be interviewed in a magazine or tell a group of hunters that they need to come back to their traditional spots and that everything is better now - just 6 years later, would be the biggest lie's we have heard since Vietnam.
On top of Clearfield Mountain - you can still see for a mile beneath the tree canopy. On the sides of RT 322, from Clearfield towards SB Elliot, there are no deer to be found grazing on the green grass that grows along side the roads.
On Boone mountain - you no longer see a sea of Blaze Orange hunters going through the woods on opening day. All along Caledonia Pike - the camps are empty. Medix Run - no hunters because there are no deer.
The best thing the PGC did to pee in their own pot was when they gave away Elk licenses to be raffled off by The National Wild Turkey Federation and did not give any licenses to The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, who donated money to the PGC to build the wildlife viewing area near Windslow Hill. You no longer hear about the RMEF because they washed their hands of the whole situation and refuse to get involved anymore.
Their whole reason for helping was to get a foot in the door to get their hands on some Elk Tags so they could hunt trophy Elk in Pennsylvania. They could have bought elk and land and hunted cheaper then what it cost them to help the PGC.
Just go into any bar in the Northern counties and ask the residents where the deer are and they will tell you. The deer lives beside the houses between Kane and Marionville. By doing that, they are away from public hunting pressure - because you can't hunt beside a house. The have their choice of food to eat - both from peoples bird feeders, deer feeders, and from the plants in the gardens and the shrubbery.
When you go to southern Jefferson county and ask the same question, their answer would be that most of the deer are on posted property. The property owners acts as if the deer are theirs and they patrol their land and will have who ever trespasses arrested.
Our problem is - when hunters from the north gets disgusted, they either move south to where they can find one or two easy deer or they quit. If they quit, the PGC just sells more tags.
Each hunter that wants can pretty much get 3 tags in 2D - even though it has a 4 points antler restrictions for adult hunters - but kids can shoot anything with antlers and the parents just take them along so they can shoot more deer and then they just get the kids to tag them for them. The worst thing the PGC ever did was remove the age restriction and allow hunters to make their own deer tags out of a piece of paper and put their kids names on it and allow them to go back to shooting spikes and anything with less then 4 points to one side.
All it did was make the landowners close up more land to public hunting and make the deer on public lands even more scarce.
Gary Alt had two things in mind when he instituted his plan.
First was to get Pennsylvania into the same league as Colorado, where you have to compete for a deer tag and where you have an opportunity to hunt for trophy whitetail deer. We had very few trophy deer before the antler restrictions.
The second goal was to fill his pockets with as much money as quickly as possible and then split. Gary took as much graft and corruption as he could and then he retired, which was the goal of the PGC.
The biggest waste of money was when they closed the Game School near Brockway and moved it to Harrisburgh so it would be closer to the state capitol. When the Game School was located near Brockway - you had all kinds of deer because you had a whole team of potential game wardens on the property - patrolling the area.
Even down near Knoxdale at one time in SGL 31, they had a stone camp that was used to house a Game Warden in deer season, who patrolled the lines between the hunting preserve and the open for public areas in the Game Lands. Back then we had all kinds of deer.
Today, the game warden doesn't even get out of his truck anymore.
There is no money to be made in fines when there is no limit to the amount of deer that you can legally shoot in one season.
The Game Warden probably makes more revenue by fine's for people with loaded guns in their vehicles or leaning against their vehicles then he does from people illegally shooting more deer then they are entitled to.
A couple more years and we will all be going to a zoo to see a deer.