These are a couple of firsts.
Here in Pennsylvania, ever since the Game Commission created its deer management assistance program, or DMAP, it’s awarded permits to landowners looking to allow hunters to kill additional antlerless deer almost without fail.
Not this year. For the first time, the commission rejected some of the requests submitted by the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
The department asked for 16,274 permits for use on 886,023 acres of state forest and park land for the 2015-16 hunting seasons. The commission rejected the specific requests for five parcels seeking 1,592 permits. That’s a cut of about 10 percent.
The potential DMAP sites rejected were unit 543 on Michaux State Forest, seeking 878 permits; unit 1551 on Elk State Forest, seeking 389, unit 1678 on Bald Eagle State Forest, seeking 275; and units 1355 and 1183 on Gallitzin State Forest, seeking 25 permits each.
Hunter concerns drove that.
Game Commissioners said in May that while DMAP doesn’t lead to a lot of deer killed – the total reported was 1,766 statewide last year – they hear an inordinate amount of complaints about its use on state forests in particular.
Later this month they’re expected to try addressing that by giving themselves the authority to tweak future department DMAP requests, and OK them only in part if they so choose.
Right now, they can’t do that. The way the language of the program is written, the agency has two choices: it can award a forest landowner one DMAP tag for every 50 acres of woods or it can reject that request. There’s no middle ground.
Commission staff told board members then they had no reason to doubt the science behind department requests for DMAP tags this year, and it looked as if it might get all it requested.
But that’s not happening.
Cindy Adams Dunn, Secretary of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, responded to that by saying it may change how it does some things going forward.
“While we are disappointed by the rejections, we find it supportive the commissioners agree our original allocation recommendations were based on sound science. Our biologists, foresters and park managers continue to ascribe to a dynamic, thorough, detailed, and scientific process that leads to all DCNR applications,” Dunn said.
“As the rejections apparently were linked to social considerations, we hope to work more closely in the future with the PGC and hunting community to help hunters find productive deer areas, and to better inform the hunter why balanced deer numbers and forest health are so important to all wildlife and state forest users.”
Meanwhile, in New York, one community did something that hasn’t been done for decades: it paid individual hunters a bounty to kill deer.
According to a story by the Associated Press, officials in Block Island paid hunters $150 this past season for every white-tailed deer tail they submitted. That led to more than 400 deer killed.
In the article, town manager Nancy Dodd said the program led to more deer killed for less money than what it would have cost the community to pay a team of professional sharpshooters. One company wanted $128,000 to remove 200 deer.
Dodge said the community plans to offer the bounty again this season.
