The Pennsylvania Game Commission is “still in the middle” of getting results back from 4,500 hunter-killed white-tailed deer tested for chronic wasting disease.
But already, things are looking bad.
Twenty-five deer statewide tested positive for the disease, known as CWD, last year, said Wayne Laroche, the agency’s special assistant for CWD response. Thirty have come back positive already from this season, and he’s expecting that number to hit 50 or 60.
What’s worse is where a couple of those sick deer turned up.
This past summer, for the first time ever, a CWD-positive deer was found within the boundaries of disease management area 3, in northwestern Pennsylvania. It’s primarily in Jefferson and Clearfield counties.
A wildlife conservation officer put that animal down on state game land 87 in Clearfield County when it was found exhibiting signs of the illness.
This fall, though, two more sick deer were found.
One was killed about 1.5 miles south of the existing disease area boundary, near McGees Mills, Laroche said. It was taken in October by an archer.
The other was a roadkill collected from Route 322 on the extreme west end of the disease area.
“I didn’t like the distribution of those,” Laroche said.
They’ll likely lead to an as-yet-undetermined expansion of disease area 3, Laroche said.
In the meantime, the commission and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are preparing to do sharpshooting in disease area 3. The intent is to kill an undetermined number of deer – family groups – to see if that might slow the spread of the disease.
“It seems like we’re on schedule pretty well. We’re prepared to initiate right after the (deer) seasons are done right around Jan. 15,” Laroche said.
Additional shooting may be done around Portage in Cambria County and at other sites in disease area 2, especially if other CWD-positive deer are found.
There’s a cost to all of those efforts, said commission president Brian Hoover of Chester County. He wants the public to be aware of just what it is.
He asked commission executive director Bryan Burhans to tally those expenses and present a report to the board at its Jan. 28-30 meeting in Harrisburg.
“As this thing grows, and we have to start to process more and more deer, I think it’s going to get out of hand. And there’s going to be a point where we need to do something else,” Hoover said.
A bill before the U.S. Congress would allocate federal funds to the states for fighting CWD, Laroche said. But it has yet to be passed, let alone funded, he added.
There may be a social cost to sharpshooting, too.
In October, the commission put together a CWD communications committee. It formed advisory committees in disease areas 2 and 3 made up of hunters, farmers, sportsmen’s clubs, taxidermists, landfill operators and others.
Meetings followed. Commission staff sought feedback on what the groups thought of various disease control options.
“We stressed that it’s not a vote. And just because we have a management option out there, you don’t need to like it,” said Cheryl Trewella, coordinator of the CWD committee. “What we wanted to know is, can you live with it?”
Two things became clear early on, she noted.
First, people in disease area 2, who have lived with the disease for five years, are more aware and less panicked about the disease than those in area 3, she said.
Second, they’re less interested in sharpshooting.
Committee members in both areas said they could support a ban on the importation of high-risk deer parts from anywhere in the country. Right now, the ban extends only to states known to have CWD.
Both groups said they could support statewide bans on the use of natural deer urine and deer feeding, too, Trewella said.
But while those in disease area 3 were largely OK with sharpshooting – so long as it occurred after hunting seasons — their counterparts in disease area 2 were not.
“In DMA 2, we had a lot of pushback on sharpshooting,” Trewella said. “A lot of the opinion was, we already have it here. What is sharpshooting going to help with?”
Hoover wondered if the issue might be numbers. Sharpshooting doesn’t necessarily mean killing a lot of deer, he said.
It might mean just shooting 10 deer in an area – a family group – and then moving on if no disease is found.
That is what Laroche said at one time. That thinking appears to have changed, however.
There’s no way, short of killing every deer in an area, to ever say disease has been eliminated, said Chris Rosenberry, chief of the commission’s deer and elk section. It is possible to get to a point where the chances of missing it are very low.
That, though, would probably require killing 60 percent of the deer in a three-square-mile area surrounding one positive case,
That’s not thousands of deer, he said. But it won’t be 10 either.
“A 60 percent reduction is going to be noticed. It might be a small area, but if happens to be your area, that’s big,” Rosenberry said.
Hoover’s not sure that will prove acceptable.
“I can see that the hunters are going to revolt against it,” he added.
Burhans said they did in Wisconsin, when similar measures were tried, which is why there are parts of that state where CWD prevalence rates approach 50 percent of the herd.
If that’s to be avoided here, the public – and hunters – are going to have to buy in to control measures, he said.
“That will dictate whether or not we’re able to pull it off,” Burhans said.
Elk hunt proves successful
One fear surrounding chronic wasting disease is that it could conceivably get into the state’s elk herd.
That would be unfortunate, to say the least, given that elk hunting here is proving successful and productive.
Jeremy Banfield, the Game Commission’s elk biologist, said 30.606 people – representing 49 states — applied for an elk license last year. One hundred and eighteen were awarded tags.
All 25 of those who were able to kill a bull did do. Four or five of the elk harvested had gigantic racks scoring more than 400 Boone & Crockett.
“So that’s absolutely outstanding in terms of bull caliber,” Banfield said.
Meanwhile, 86 percent of hunters able to kill a cow elk did so.
No recommendation on elk tags for 2018 will come before April. But Banfield said already that he wants to create a new elk hunt zone.
Currently, there are 13 zones. Banfield wants to add zone 14 this fall. It would be located east of zone 10 and encompass 330,000 acres, 86 percent of it public land. Most of that is Susquehannock State Forest.
A growing subpopulation of elk has lived in that area year-round since 2013. It’s numbers 70 animals now.
The plan is be to allow for some “light” hunting there this fall, Banfield said.
