Rifle deer-hunting season opened to a brisk, clear start early Monday in central Pennsylvania, as vehicles lined rural roads and bright orange dotted the state’s forests.
The state Game Commission won’t release the reported deer-harvest rates until the season ends in a couple weeks. But on opening day alone, the commission projected that some 750,000 people would be hunting.
At Adler’s Market in Philipsburg, owner Paul Adler said he anticipates a poor harvest this season. He said his market, which processes venison for hunters, has seen harvests decline steadily since about 2001, shortly after the state began extending doe season.
Each year since then, Adler said, the volume of venison he processes during deer season has dropped about 30 percent to 35 percent. He expects that ‘this year’s going to be worse yet,’ he said.
‘You cannot shoot all of the does and expect there to be fawns next year,’ Adler said. ‘It’s common sense.’
Ideally, he said, he would like the state to allow two weeks of buck season and three days of doe season. This year, rifle hunters in the Centre County area are allowed to hunt antlered deer for about two weeks and antlerless deer for about a week.
Hunters took fewer than 309,000 deer from the state’s forests in 2009 — the lowest number in 22 years, according to The Associated Press.
In fact, the Game Commission has engineered the decline in deer-herd sizes over the past decade, according to a report by Penn State senior Gary Lewis Jr. He wrote that the expansion of doe season is meant to balance out the gender distribution of Pennsylvania’s deer, which had become overpopulated with females.
The Game Commission also has been trying to let the ‘forest canopy to regenerate adequately, and to protect 50 percent of the yearling bucks,’ or those between one and two years old, according to Lewis.
In parts of Pennsylvania, including central Pennsylvania, the total deer population has dipped nearly 50 percent in the past decade, he wrote.
The Game Commission media office in Harrisburg referred press questions Monday to the commission’s regional offices. The office responsible for overseeing Centre County did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
Here’s a look at other deer-hunting news making headlines on our own site and across Pennsylvania early this week:
