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

3 When You Can’t See the Forest for the Deer

3 when you can’t see the forest for the deer John Dzemyan is tall and lanky, with a loose-jointed, limb-swinging gait. The first time I saw him walking across the parking lot of the Game Commission’s maintenance building near Ridgway, he immediately reminded me of Shaggy, Scooby Doo’s laid-back sidekick. Like that cartoon character, he was friendly, easygoing, quick to smile and laugh. When he took off his hat, revealing a bald spot that he said back in college was covered with thick hair that hung down his back in a ponytail, the image was complete. I could just picture John cruising around campus in the 1960s in a brightly colored panel van, hanging out with the gang. Unlike Shaggy, though, John’s no jittery follower. There’s iron in him, a resoluteness forged by years of standing in the heat cast by Pennsylvania’s deer wars. This was evident one day when Greg and I met Dzemyan for a tour of state game lands 44 in Elk County. Game lands 44 is located in the heart of Pennsylvania’s big woods country. At the dawn of the twentieth century, when the great timber cuts that leveled the state’s forests began, the woods of Pennsylvania’s northern tier were the first to be cut down. Fortunately—in a move that ranks as one of the greatest conservation legacies in the state’s history—the Game Commission and Bureau of Forestry began buying up that scarred land at tax sales. Trees were planted, the land was allowed to heal, and the hardwood forest we have today—among the most commercially viable in the world—took root. Those northern tier forests were also the first places in the state to be restocked with whitetails. When the deer populations skyrocketed, hunters followed, so many camps springing up that they seemed to match the number of trees and deer. It quickly became tradition for generations of hunters—grandfathers, fathers, sons, uncles, and brothers—to trek north every fall to hunt deer. Over the next half-dozen decades, places like game lands 44 served as the backdrop for countless grainy black-and-white pictures of men and boys of various shapes and sizes, all standing or sitting or kneeling in front of the camp meat pole, an impressive bunch of deer strung up behind them. But somewhere along the way, things began to change. Deer became harder to find. Big-racked bucks, especially, seemed to disappear. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, other parts of the state became better places to hunt deer. By the 1990s, the ten-county southwestern corner of the state surrounding Pittsburgh, the state’s second-largest city, was Pennsylvania’s new hot spot for deer. That remains the case, as this area—not the big woods of the north—has topped the state in both buck and doe harvests for more than a decade. As a wildlife conservation officer in the northern tier and later as a land manager there, Dzemyan has taken a lot of abuse because of that. From verbal beatings at sportsmen’s clubs to letters published in newspapers, the Game Commission and its officers, including Dzemyan, have been ripped for allowing the big deer herds of the past to disappear from the state’s northern forests. Many hunters have blamed the decline on the overharvest of does. In fact, Dzemyan says, the exact opposite is true. The Game Commission hasn’t allowed hunters to take enough does over the years, and the state’s forests—and the deer that live in them—have suffered for it. “Some sportsmen say that we’re shooting too many deer because the timber companies are having too much influence on deer management, or that farmers are having too much influence, or that the insurance companies are having too much influence. Those are the three biggest lies that have ever been told around this state,” Dzemyan said. “The problem is the deer themselves. Deer are a prey species. They need predation to stay in balance with nature, and there’s only one critter left in Pennsylvania that can do that. That’s humans. That’s hunters. “Deer are just like monstrous rabbits. If you’ve ever had a garden, you know rabbits can just decimate it. Well, deer can do the same thing to a forest ecosystem ,” Dzemyan said. “The key to Elk County, the key to all of Pennsylvania, is to harvest more does...