BTBowhunter

We've been down this road before and the answers arent going to change and you will dismiss them when I explain. Move on please.

bluebird2

in other words you don't have a rational rebuttal,as usual. I have the facts and all you have is your opinions.

BTBowhunter

Present something new, undistorted, with documentation of your source and maybe we'll have a discusion. The stuff you just posted ahs been done to death and we'll never agree.

Otherwise, out of repect for the other members of this forum, I'm not going to get into another meaning less back and forth game of nitpicking with you.

bluebird2

After calling me a liar ,Bluejob and other names now you suddenly want to take the high road to avoid answering questions for which you have no answers. You totally misrepresented the issues regarding the effects of sample size on the breeding rates and you misrepresented my position on that issue.

Therefore, you are in no position to to tell me what i should post.

BTBowhunter

The name calling and attacks ran both ways. You stated your position and I stated mine. There's nothing more we can say without repeating ourselves and we're simply not going to agree. Again, out of respect for the other members here, lets move on

bluebird2

I never called you a BLXX job or anything close to that. you have called me a liar over and over again without any facts to support your claims and engaged in constant cheap shots and insults.

You can move on to whatever you want, but don't lie about my positions and don't engage in mindless name calling as you have done in the past.

explorer_Jack

If your deer numbers are way below carry capacity in 2G, Why does the PGC still give out 21,000 doe tags and who knows how many Dmap tags for 2G?
They don't even take predators into account when manageing wildlife and carry capacity. That is crazy.

bluebird2

They take predators in account, but the predators don't kill enough deer to keep the PGC happy ,so they issue doe tags and DMAP tags so that DCNR can grow more oak trees without fencing.

sproulman

blue-bird,he is trying to say he is not going to use those words .how about you too

i do hope you both CONTINUE to disagree or agree if proven that something is fact .

it would be sad if this info from you and others does not continue,i learned a lot from all on here too.

this is best forum i have ever been on, none better.

R.S.B.

The reason unit 2B can continue to harvest so many deer year after years has very little to do with posted or unhunted property. After all if that were really the case that unit would have fewer deer per square mile then the public land areas instead of over four times as many. The fact is hunters have been hammering the antler less deer in the areas that make up unit 2B with unlimited antler less tags and doe harvests for over fifteen years now. In spite of those high doe harvests they still can’t get the deer numbers reduced and have to use sharp shooters at night in many areas to even control the ever increasing populations.

The reason the deer numbers keep increasing there is because the Game Commission never allowed the deer populations to get high enough in the areas that make up unit 2B for the deer to cause extensive damage to their food supply. The way they prevented that from happening was by allowing hunters to have unlimited antler less license and basically kill as many does as they wanted. By doing that they protected the deer habitat which allowed the deer numbers to keep increasing.

I have hunted in various areas of unit 2B and though there are many posted areas I never had much trouble getting permission to hunt most of it. There are very few areas that someone isn’t hunting and those few places that no one hunts are generally just small areas that are less then the home range of a deer. So almost all of the deer at some point in time are in an areas that can be and is hunted. Once the pressure starts some deer do move into protected areas where few hunters have access to them but many still end up being harvested in those protected properties. I’ve been there to see some of them harvested.

Even when the deer do go into the protected areas they only stay there during the high hunting pressure times and then they come back out to the area where the deer populations had been controlled, through deer harvests, to feed the rest of the year. That allows all of the remaining deer having enough food to be healthy and produce healthy fawns with high survival rates each spring. Heck the cars kill more deer in those areas each year then the hunters in unit 2G have been killing.

Meanwhile, in unit 2G the hunters and their politician alias have been demanding lower antler less allocations and harvests for many decades and usually the Game Commission has caved in an granted their wishes and demands. That is the very reason there are so few deer there today. We over protected the deer and totally ignored the damage they were doing to their food supply and habitat. Eventually the habitat got so poor darn few deer could live there except during years with ideal mast crops and mild winters.

Unit 2G has few deer today, except in those areas where the habitat has recovered due to recent timbering or other habitat development work, because each deer need enough food to survive all year not just during the ideal summer months.

The big woods areas would have more deer today if the hunters had allowed the professional deer managers to do the right thing and harvest in all of those past years and decades. But, the evidence is indicating that the big woods habitat can recover in the future and perhaps faster then we first believed. If the unknowledgeable hunters and their political alias don’t continue once again to get their way and we can get and keep the big woods deer harvests high enough I am darn confident we will see more deer in those big woods areas once again in the future then we have now.
If the under educated hunters and politicians get their way though we will just watch even more areas of the state start experiencing habitat damage and declining deer numbers.

Once other thing that everyone has to understand is that not all parts of the state can or ever will support as many deer as some of the other areas. Many areas of the state have poor soils, rocky outcroppings or other adverse conditions that simply will never support as many deer as the richer soil, farm lands habitat can support. Nothing can change the affects nature has on the environmental conditions so all we can do is live with what is instead of what we wish.

This post is not just directed at Bluebird’s post but intended to address the issues raised by several recent posts.

R.S. Bodenhorn