Ok , you say Alt 's giving us MORE but lower quality deer. Got it

yep we got MORE deer now than when he started according to deaddeer

no, wait we have less deer after all. The buck kill indicates that

By chance are you a senator from Massachusetts as well as a deer biologist???

No , I am not a flip flopper like Kerry. However , I am capable of viewing all the information the PGC provides and reaching my own conclusions. Maybe you can explain why with 1.6M PS deer the buck harvest was lower than when we had less than 1M PS deer in 1985. How many 1.5 do you think were carried over from 1984 without AR? The buck saved by AR in 2002 should have replaced the 1.5 buck saved by AR this year and our buck harvest should have been at least 200K,but it wasn't. Can you tell us why??????

The problem, deaddeer is that you are so bent on immediately discrediting Gary Alt. You continue to spew carefully chosen numbers and statistics that are only part of a very big, very complex picture.
You remind me of the guy who jumps up 1/4 of the way through a mystery movie and screams "the butler did it!" The one thing I heard over and over from Gary Alt was that this wasn't going to get fixed quickly and that it was quite likely that they would make mistakes along the way. I don't know, and neither do you, why the 2.5 year old buck kill this year didn't exactly bring the buck harvest back to 100% of post AR levels but I have a few educated guesses as to what MIGHT have been a factor

2.5 year old bucks are EXPONENTIALLY harder to kill than 1.5's

Weather on the biggest killing days hampered the hunters (we have years of data to back that up)

Hunter numbers keep dropping slightly each year (fact) and far fewer seem to travel to the big woods and/or spend as many days hunting as they used to (just my opinion based on personal experience)

The GPS studies indicated that hunting pressure is VERY light after the first day and most hunters today don't get far from the road, don't hunt where its steep, and don't hunt where it's thick. This is 2004 not 1984

Maybe none of the above made a significant difference, maybe one of them made all the difference. The point is that it's simply too early to tell.

When Gary Alt took over management of our bears, success wasn't immediate. He didn't start out as a bear expert but he became one.

He started this telling us that he wasn't an expert on Pennsylvania deer, yet. What he has is the training and ability to make changes based on good science, evaluate their effects, modify, and adapt till he gets it right.

Is he right all the time? NO will he make more mistakes? YES
Do I agree with everything he's done? NO Is there someone who has a better chance to become an expert on Pa deer management and making things better than they are now over time than Gary Alt? Maybe, but who?

Here's a bit of information for you experts out there that say the excessive doe tags are wiping out the big woods deer herd. The fawn study showed out of 228 fawns captured and collared only 7 were killed by hunters through the. 9 were killed by cars. 90 died of natural causes including predation. 53 of the 90 were killed by predators. I'm not going to draw a conclusion based on this one little fact (cause its a small part of the big picture) but it does raise the question that maybe it's not hunting pressure to blame for the fact that we see less deer in the big woods.

Deaddeer, I know you care a great deal about these issues and obviously spend a lot of time following and studying them. Why not relax a bit and give the qualified people the chance to do their jobs? It will take a little time.

Of course I know why the buck harvest didn't return to normal the second year of AR. The main reason is because AR doesn't add any additional legal buck to the herd , it decreases the number of legal buck by the amount of buck that are lost to non-hunting mortality. Also, over 20% of the buck saved by AR won't be AR legal as 2.5 buck ,so that also decreases the harvest.


The question you should be asking is why was the 2003 buck harvest 23K lower than the 2002 harvest. We didn't have any buck saved by AR in 2002 ,but we harvested more buck than we did in 2003. Adding the AR in the SRA counties only accounts for a decrease of around 3 K buck,so that was not the cause . The answer is that due to the anterless harvest of 352K in 2002 ,we harvested 15K more BB than we did in 2001 ,so there were 15K less 2.5 buck to be harvested. Also, AR did not save 38K additional buck in 2002. It only saved around 20K.

of course you know. You obviously have all the answers to deer management.

exactly how does a 2002 bb age to 2.5 by 2003?

You re right. That was obviously a typo. However ,the point is still valid since 1.5's buck will still make up over 60% of the buck harvested and the more BB we kill the fewer that survive to become 1.5's.

Ok! Ok! Ok!, Time out is being called by me. I started this as a whimsical post and it's getting ugly! Everybody go to your rooms! Let's just wait til next deer season, ok?

BT, I am so confused by looking at all the #'s that DD is spewing my eyeballs are going around in circles[:-]

I am with you weather and the fact that the 2.5 year old deer are ALOT smarter makes all the sense in the world to me. If you did any scouting or spotlighting before the season it was easy to see the # of Larger, better quality bucks that were around.. As i keep saying Can't wait till next year and the year after that!!

I personally cant wait till next year! Pulling treestands and shed hunting just aint doin it for me

If 2.5 buck are so much smarter maybe you can explain how we managed to harvest 52.6 K ,2.5+ buck in 2002 ,before there were any buck saved by AR? Then you can explain why we harvested much less than 52.6 K 2.5 buck in2003. Are the buck saved by AR smarter than the pre-AR 2.5 buck?

Rememeber, Ar was suppose to increase the number of 2.5+ buck ,so if it is working there should have been alot more PS 2.5 buck in 2003 and we should have harvested more of them than in 2002. Or is our AR working like it did in Miss.,where they save alot more 1.5 buck than show up in future harvests as 2.5+ buck?