BTBowhunter

You are simply too stupid to realize that influence toward managing the woods for healthy forest regeneration is coming from our hosts who let us hunt. You still have the right to buy your own ground and manage it as your see fit but timber interests, faremers etcown the vast majority of the landwe hunt and only the most arrogant SOB would expect them to want anything different.

Oh and as for the non SGL public ground. The 90% of this state who doesnt hunt has a right to a voice too. We'd certainly all rather see state land for wildlife and hunters as priority one but that's just not the way the world works.

Cornelius08

"I agree with the principle of smaller WMU's but I also concede that smaller WMU's make the job of deer management far more complex than it already is.At least the move to smaller WMU's should be delayed until it is more clear that the herd has been stabilized and the present WMu management has stabilized to the maximum extent possible."

Smaller wmus would be extremely simple. And if other states wildlife management agencies can manage it, the idiots at the gameless commission can too. Fact is, they dont want to because then there'd be no basis and theyd have not excusefor widespread slaughter.

Cornelius08

"You still have the right to buy your own ground and manage it as your see fit but timber interests, faremers etcown the vast majority of the landwe hunt and only the most arrogant SOB would expect them to want anything different. "

Most land isnt farmed. Most landowners did not demand the rediculous extremes of blanket reduction. Only a very few factions did. Audubon/treehuggers and timber/dcnr. Society didnt cause the problem, pgc did.

Coalcracker

It's getting so deep now, I'llhave to take off my hipboots and put on my waders Crapperhead.

bluebird2

And apparently you are to stupid to realize that ever since the Audubon Deer conference ,I have been saying that forest certification ,DCNR , the timber industry and the Audubon were the driving force behind the current push for HR. It was not based on producing a healthier herd or better hunting as we were told. The simple fact is that the vast majority of our forests are not managed for timber production and only a little more than half of DCNR land is managed for timber. Yet were reduced the herd statewide ,including SGL, to make it easier for DCNR to grow more timber on 1.1M acres of some of the poorest land in the state.

Cornelius08

EXACTLY!!

R.S.B.

First of all the WMU are designed, and laid out, to work for nearly all of the hunted wildlife species not just deer. Therefore, they are set up by habitat types, land ownership (public verse private) soil types, population centers and more are all taken into consideration.

Now with that said smaller management units would make for better management provided there was enough wildlife provided data to make wise scientifically supported management. The professionals simply have to have enough scientifically supported data because everything has to be supported with sound data in today’s world. All one need do is look at the fact of the Game Commission’s deer management program being presently being challenged in court by a group of hunters to see how valid that fact is.

What many people don’t seem to know though is that even before WMUs when there were county allocations many of those counties were all lumped together with exactly the same management plan as it related to targeted deer harvests and populations. Often two or three counties were all lumped together because there wasn’t enough scientifically sound deer or hunter harvest data available to manage at the county level. If I remember correctly, without looking it up, I believe there were really only 30 management units being used even when the allocations were set up by counties. Those counties within the same management unit still had allocations that were basically the same per square mile except when the Board of Commissioners made arbitrary chances to them.

The data that is presently lacking and yet required to manage at a smaller unit level are the reproductive data that comes from highway killed female deer between the first of February and the end of May each year. Some areas just don’t have many deer killed on the highways to obtain that data. The other data that is seriously lacking in some areas is harvest data that hunters should be submitting on their harvest report cards or collected by the deer aging teams visiting processing locations during the season.

Until those problems can be corrected going to smaller deer management units would be nothing more then a shot in the dark unless the management objectives still stayed the same and all that were done was making smaller units to restrict hunter movements to smaller areas while maintaining the same management objectives in those smaller units.

I do believe that in time, provided sufficient scientifically sound deer data can be obtained, there will be deer management sub-units within some of the present wildlife management units.

R.S. Bodenhorn

explorer_Jack

Why all of a sudden there is talk about other wildlife? I mean deer was the main hunters target in PA and the deer herd was allways looked after by the PGC before the HR came into play. Now all of a sudden it is all about other wildlife talk and less about deer. What or who is the influence of the change here. Nothing about other wildlife then all of a sudden it's about all wildlife.Something fishy going on there in PA. Smells like tree huggers and the ecos infiltrated the PGC. Never has there been as much talk about all wildlife till recent,Why's that?

bluebird2

None of that matters because there is no indication that the PGC is managing the herd based on either herd health or forest health!!!!

Cornelius08

"First of all the WMU are designed, and laid out, to work for nearly all of the hunted wildlife species not just deer. Therefore, they are set up by habitat types, land ownership (public verse private) soil types, population centers and more are all taken into consideration. "

No reason to believe other species wouldnt benefit from smaller management units as well.

"Now with that said smaller management units would make for better management provided there was enough wildlife provided data to make wise scientifically supported management. The professionals simply have to have enough scientifically supported data because everything has to be supported with sound data in today’s world."

They didnt have one shred of scientific datain regards to exactly what needed done etc. before jumping feet first into the whole deer program nonsense in the first place, so dont try and tell us tweaking aint possible now!!!! If the current system exactly as is isnt conducive to smaller wmus....CHANGE THE &*^% system! It works in many other states!!!

We dont need to hear lame excuses. There are none valid. Pgc wants no change. They want widescale blanket reduction and thats b.s.


"I do believe that in time, provided sufficient scientifically sound deer data can be obtained, there will be deer management sub-units within some of the present wildlife management units. "

We dont need a handful of"subunits", (which you are only guessing at anyway and the exact opposite has been stated by ROsenberry who want the large wmus) we need large scale RESTRUCTURE!! SMALLER UNITS. There is no reason not to. It would be an incredible outreach from pgc to the hunters of the state, and better management as well.