PGC sets deer seasons

Members of the Pennsylvania Game Commission have put the finishing touches on plans for the 2008-09 deer-hunting seasons. Once again, issuance of antlerless deer licenses will be the chief deer management tool.

A substantial change is a fiveday, antlered deer only season in some parts of the state, including Wildlife Management Units 2G, which encompasses all of Cameron County and all of Potter and McKean counties below Rt. 6.

It will start on the Monday after Thanksgiving (Dec. 1) and run to Dec. 5, followed immediately by seven days of concurrent antlered and antlerless deer hunting (Dec. 6-13).

The Game Commission retained the two-week (Dec. 1-13) concurrent antlered and antlerless season elsewhere, including WMU 3A, which covers the sections of Potter and McKean counties north of Rt. 6.

Carl Roe, Game Commission executive director, said the changes "will allow us to investigate the relationship between antlerless allocations and season length as we move forward with our deer management plan."

WMU 2G was chosen because the area has ongoing deer research, Roe added.

"Antlerless deer harvest versus number of days of opportunity, or the overall season length, will be evaluated," Roe said. "In the future, stakeholders may be able to provide input by sharing whether they'd like more opportunity via time, such as two weeks or more, or more people involved through perhaps more tags and shorter seasons."

Also this week, the Game Commission approved antlerless deer license allotments. Roe said the decisions were based on measurements of deer health, habitat health, level of deer-human conflicts and deer population trends.

In WMU 2G, there will be 26,000 licenses sold, the same figure as in 2007, with a goal of maintaining a stable deer population.

Allotment for WMU 3A has been trimmed to 26,000; it was 29,000 last year. The cutback is geared toward maintaining a stable population of whitetails in 3A.