I was not complaining about the number of deer or the number of licenses allocated. If an area has a low population, I agree with reducing the kill. But that can be accomplished by reducing the number of antlerless licenses issued instead of reducing the number of days. I have had the opportunity to discuss this with Chris Rosenberry and Brett Wallingford. When the switch was made from 2 weeks concurrent to the 6 days, license allocations were increased by nearly 20% to keep harvest levels the same. If the PGC wanted to kill 3000 deer in a WMu, they could give out 3000 licenses and give the hunter from Sept 1 to Jan 1. Currently the harvest rate is between 25- 30% so they need to issue about 12,000 tags to kill 3000 doe. If a hunter is given more time success rates should improve thus resulting in a lower number of tags needing to be issued. The original thought of DMAP was to lower the deep population in the state forest lands and other larger private tracts to allow the forest to recover from the over browsing that had been going on for decades. The landowners were supposed to make forest improvements during the time of lower deer population. This is why the PGC has started using Prescribed fire but the higher ups at DCNR are still anti-fire and are not using it.
