Deer Wars: Science, Tradition, and the Battle over Managing Whitetails in Pennsylvania

9 Getting to the Point of Managing Deer Correctly

9 getting to the point of managing deer correctly Josh Schrecengost’s words—“From this point on, we’re pretty much silent”— belied the chaos that was to come. Schrecengost and three other members of a deer capture team were walking up a forest road, Greg, Marrett Grund, and me in tow, headed for a clover box trap that held a whitetail. Their task was to put radio transmitters and ear tags on antlered deer, and they were hoping this deer was a button buck. Their work was the backbone of a study, carried out by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, U.S. Geological Survey, and Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Penn State University, that began in the winter of 2002. The buck study, as the project was called, was meant to do four things: determine the survival of bucks between the ages of six and thirty months; see when bucks disperse and how far they go when they do; see how antler restrictions—scheduled to go into effect for the first time the following fall—would change the male age structure of the deer herd; and measure hunter satisfaction with antler restrictions. The study, it was obvious even then, was critical if the Game Commission hoped to earn public acceptance of antler restrictions, the most radical change to Pennsylvania deer management proposed in half a century. For about fifty years, any buck with one spike at least three inches long or one antler with two points had been considered legal game in Pennsylvania. Gary Alt had proposed that hunters be limited to shooting only those bucks with at least three, and in some places four, points to one side of their rack. Adopting this strategy, Alt said, would have two benefits. It would let more bucks survive to breed when they’re older, healthier, and stronger; and it would give hunters the chance to harvest higherquality bucks. Prior to antler restrictions, many of the state’s hunters had never had the opportunity to shoot a really big buck, he said, because Pennsylvania’s deer program didn’t allow that to happen. White-tailed deer experience their greatest antler growth between the ages of two and three. In Pennsylvania, though, hunters had typically killed 90 percent of the state’s bucks each fall. With more than 80 percent of them yearlings, fewer than one in a hundred bucks ever lived to reach four years old. Statistics for 1999 showed that a little more than 13 percent of all the bucks harvested statewide were spikes. Things weren’t too bad in areas of prime habitat, where even young bucks could grow decent antlers quickly. Just 1 percent of the bucks harvested in Lawrence County in 1999 were spikes. In Butler County, the percentage of spikes was 6, in Lancaster 5, and in Westmoreland 8. In the state’s northern-tier counties, though—the site of the big woods but also the worst deer habitat in the state— spikes were much more common. In Tioga County, 17 percent of all the bucks killed in 1999 were spikes. In Clearfield, the percentage was 18. In Clinton and Susquehanna counties it was 20, in Cameron it was 21, and in Potter and Centre Counties it was 22 percent. In Elk and McKean Counties, 26 percent of all the bucks shot were spikes. In Forest County, the figure was a whopping 32 percent. The fact that Pennsylvania hunters grew up accustomed to shooting small deer made them popular around the country, said Brian Murphy of the Quality Deer Management Association (qdma). Their expectations were so low that outfitters in other states found them easy to please. “It’s sort of a joke, but it’s true,” says Murphy. “They can take a Pennsylvania hunter out and let him shoot a two-and-a-half-year-old buck with a thirteen- to fourteen-inch spread and eight points, and he thinks he’s shot Old Mossy Horns because he’s never seen anything like that. They can give Pennsylvania hunters an average deer and save the bigger bucks for other hunters.” Things don’t have to be that way, Alt says. And they shouldn’t be. “We kill a greater percentage of our bucks each year than any other state in the country. Why? Because our grandfathers taught our fathers, who taught us, that if you see a buck, you killed it,” says Alt. “You just flattened it. I don’t think that’s anything...