Game Commission Regional Director Mark Ternent Discusses Wildlife, Habitat, Hunting, and a New Headquarters Near Bellefonte
By Mark Brackenbury
As director of the Northcentral Region of the Pennsylvania Game Commission (pa.gov/agencies/pgc), Mark Ternent oversees 382,000 acres of state game lands across 10 counties.
Soon, the hub of the region’s operations will be based in Happy Valley.
Work is tentatively scheduled to begin this winter on a project to bring the region’s headquarters — and the public outreach services that accompany it — to game lands off of Interstate 99 near Bellefonte.
The new headquarters, with about 20 offices, will be constructed near the parking area of State Game Lands 333 off Shiloh Road, north of the I-99 Exit 76 interchange.
“We currently anticipate the project going out for bids this fall followed by initial groundbreaking in early winter,” Ternent says. “If that happens, we’d hope to occupy the building by late 2028.”
“We expect to offer a lot more to people here in the Northcentral Region with a location closer to a population center than at the current offices in rural Jersey Shore,” he says. “We’re expecting opportunities to provide environmental education programming, the ability to have some demonstration areas on the game lands where the public can come and see what habitat management looks like in real time.”
The Northcentral Region is the most rural of the Game Commission’s six regions and has the most public lands. Those include state forests and parks managed by the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, part of the Allegheny National Forest managed by the U.S. Forest Service, and game lands managed by the Game Commission.
Game wardens enforce game and wildlife regulations on all of those properties.
“So, low population, high public land, which means lots of wildlife resources,” Ternent says.
A staff of 100 to 110 employees, along with 15 to 20 volunteer deputy game wardens, helps manage those resources in roles ranging from law enforcement to wildlife research, land management, and information and education.
“When you say, ‘I work for the Game Commission,’ most people say, ‘Oh, you’re a game warden.’ It’s like, ‘No. There’s a lot more to it than that,’” Ternent says.
“We’re a bunch of passionate, like-minded individuals. We all care about conservation.”
Ternent, who lives in Howard, developed an appreciation for natural resources while growing up in rural western Maryland. He has served as the Northcentral Region’s director since 2024 and spent much of his 26-year career with the Game Commission as a bear biologist.
Ternent says he used to hunt “anything and everything.” Now that time is more limited, “I like taking my family out. We deer hunt together, both of my daughters and my wife. … I just enjoy being with them when they’re hunting.”
Here’s more from our conversation:
What are the biggest challenges your game wardens face?
Ternent: They’re covering large geographic areas. We have 25 game wardens in this region (with occasional vacancies). Ten counties. So, most officers have half a county that they patrol.
A lot of times, they’re working by themselves.
Another big challenge is just the breadth of regulations that they have to enforce.
Hunting seasons in the fall are obviously a busy time. In [the spring], it’s recreation. We do have some hunting seasons in the spring. Then you start to have small animal complaints, small animal damage, nuisance wildlife complaints. You get into mid-summer, you start to have things like crop damage complaints that they’re dealing with that are wildlife-related. It changes by season.
And our conservation officers, our game wardens, also do a lot of school workshops, sportsmen’s club meetings, helping out with sportsmen’s club event days. They’re involved with wildlife surveys. They’re ear-tagging bears during the summer; they’re helping band turkeys in the wintertime. … It’s a very diverse job.
What are your key challenges and priorities in managing the game lands?
Ternent: We have 12 habitat crews out there that their job is to just work on the game lands. That’s all the infrastructure, roads, parking lots, signage, boundary marking, habitat projects on the game lands, mowing; [they’re] improving those habitats. … And keeping the infrastructure up to snuff so that people can use those areas.
Those crews, that’s close to 50 employees right there in the region just on the land management side. They’re doing invasive plant work, treating for invasive species, including buckthorn, Japanese stiltgrass, honeysuckle, Russian olive, and thistle.
[For more information: pa.gov/agencies/dcnr/conservation/wild-plants/invasive-plants/invasive-plant-fact-sheets]
We use fire as a habitat-enhancement tool. If you have the right parameters, it’s really good at eliminating species that we don’t want and promoting species that we do. It’ll kill the invasive species and then the species that are adapted to that area return.
[For example], we do a lot of grass burns [on Game Lands 333]. … If we just took our hands off of it and stepped back and did nothing, within 5, 10 years, you’d start to see woody saplings starting to show up at the edges. And then eventually, the field would go through a successional stage and become forest again at some point.
So, fire is a way to keep setting that back, to kill those woody encroachment species and keep the grass and herbaceous stuff present.
The region is home to the elk herd, and that’s a tremendous attraction both for hunters and tourists. What’s the state of the herd right now?
Ternent: Their numbers have been slightly increasing in recent years [the Game Commission estimates as many as 1,400]. Last year, we issued 140 [hunting] licenses. This year, it’s a little higher than that [155 licenses were allocated across four 2026-27 elk seasons]. Even with that harvest, we still have a slightly increasing population in numbers and distribution.
[For more information: pa.gov/agencies/pgc/wildlife/wildlife-viewing/elk-viewing-in-pennsylvania]
Geographically, we’ve seen a steady movement of elk southwest, like Clearfield County now. Interstate 80 is the boundary of what we call our elk management area.
North of 80 [I-80] is what we consider elk range. South of 80 [I-80] is not managed for elk. We see elk moving south of 80 occasionally now.
Northeast, Kettle Creek is another area, northeast of Renovo. Ten, 15 years ago, [that area] didn’t have a lot of elk. Now, it’s become a popular place to go to see elk.
We’re getting sightings of elk in McKean County. So, we get some movement kind of northwest. Both in geographic distribution and in total numbers, they’re doing well.
What makes this one of the more popular deer hunting areas in the state?
Ternent: One of the things that’s unique and kind of special about our region is the camp culture and the heritage behind hunting camps.
Back in the day, if you wanted to hunt deer in northcentral Pennsylvania, you had to ride a train, and then you had to get off, and you had to probably ride a horse or a wagon or something, maybe walk, to get to where there were deer. And so, this idea [came about] of establishing camps in those areas so that you could stay for extended periods while you hunted; that’s back at the turn of the [20th] century.
A lot of that was on state ground where the state forest was encouraging these camps so that there were people there to help manage the deer herd.
That evolved into a camp culture that is very strong in this region. … That kind of camaraderie and just culture around having a place to go to that they call camp. That’s very, very strong and somewhat ubiquitous across the region because it’s so remote. Some of these camps are over 100 years old.
I’ve lived in other states, and you just don’t see that culture like you do here in northcentral Pennsylvania.
How is the black bear population?
Ternent: Bears are going strong. It’s been a few years since I’ve been involved with the monitoring, but I think that generally, right now, it’s between 18,000 to 20,000 bears statewide.
We had 3,000 to 4,000 bears in the early 1980s, late ’70s. So, we have four to five times the number of bears over the last 40 years. They’re doing well, but with that comes a cost. [For more information: pa.gov/agencies/pgc/wildlife/discover-pa-wildlife/black-bear/black-bear-population-growth]
Do you know anybody that’s had their bird feeder torn down by a bear?
Ternent: I don’t know if you’d call it a conflict; it’s more of a nuisance than anything. But we do deal with human-bear interactions every day in this region. That comes with the territory of having 20,000 bears in your state.
The numbers of hunting licenses have gone down over the years. How are they now?
Ternent: This is a national trend. And we actually are probably experiencing a slower decline than a lot of states. That’s because of that strong hunting heritage in Pennsylvania.
I’d say through the ’90s, maybe the early 2000s, we were close to a million [general] hunting licenses. Right now, we’re around 800,000 statewide.
We have about 13 million people in Pennsylvania. So about 6% of Pennsylvanians buy a hunting license. The national average is 5% or even in some states a lot lower than that. So, we’re doing better than most, but it’s still something we’re struggling with because recruiting new generations of hunters and retaining the ones we have is a challenge.
There’s just so many things competing for a young person’s time nowadays that getting hunting to be one of those is a challenge.
And it’s important that we do, because hunters play a very important role in a lot of conservation. They contribute financially through the excise tax that’s on sporting goods and ammunition, called the Pittman-Robertson funds. They’re federally allocated funds.
So, sportsmen directly help fund wildlife conservation agencies like ours. They help manage the wildlife population.
[We’re having problems] regenerating a forest in certain areas because of high deer numbers. Hunters are really the best tool to fix that. They play a very important role.
What programs do you have to generate interest among young people?
Ternent: When I was hired 26 years ago now, the Game Commission did not have a bureau of strategic planning and marketing. We did not have employees that focused on social media and outreach. Today, we do. We do a lot of direct marketing toward younger audiences through social media, through events that we plan.
We had one out at Scotia [this spring], a learn-to-shoot event where we encouraged people to come out, be exposed to shooting some firearms and some archery equipment. And hopefully, if they feel more comfortable about the shooting sports, that may potentially lead to a hunter someday.
We have hunter education classes. [For more information: pa.gov/agencies/pgc/huntingandtrapping/get-started-hunting]
On Game Lands 44 in Elk County, in the fall, we offer a mentored hunt for junior hunters for pheasant hunting, get them where their success chances are going to be very high, and get them introduced to hunting and get them excited about it. T&G
Mark Brackenbury is a former editor of Town&Gown.
