This is a look at the proposed new boundaries for wildlife management units if 4A is essentially made into a disease management area.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission’s war on chronic wasting disease may soon take on a new form.
Or perhaps more specifically, a new shape.
The agency is considering redrawing the boundaries of several wildlife management units to better fight the disease.
No decisions will be made before January. Even then, final approval would have to wait until April.
But right now, disease management area 2 – the only place in the state where CWD has been found in wild deer — takes in parts of five wildlife management units. That’s all of 4A and parts of 2C, 2E, 4D and 4B.
Going forward, some want to expand disease management area 2 – stretching it east and west – and make it into its own management unit, a new 4A. As redrawn, it would extend west further into Somerset and Cambria counties and east deeper in Huntingdon, Fulton and Franklin.
The point, said Brad Myers, director of the commission’s southcentral region office, would be to make it possible to fight CWD with all available tools. He said the commission conceivably could, for example, open archery season earlier in a new 4A, do away with antler restrictions, go to two weeks of concurrent buck and doe hunting or perhaps even allow hunters to shoot deer in bear season.
“If we’re serious about eradicating CWD from Pennsylvania, we need to take a no-holds-barred approach,” Myers said.
As things stand now, the disease continues to percolate in that area.
Wayne Laroche, director of the commission’s bureau of wildlife management, said five new cases of CWD have been detected in disease management area 2 so far this year. The first was found in February, the most recent in October.
Others are possible, he said, as testing of hunter-killed deer continues.
Commissioners had mixed reactions to the proposal.
Tim Layton of Windber said he might shrink the boundary of the proposed new unit to the west. The mountain ranges there seem to be a natural barrier to wasting disease expanding in that direction, he said, so perhaps the new unit need not go so far that way as suggested.
Otherwise, though, he likes the idea of the disease area being its own unit, he said. That’s something he’s advocated all along.
He’s especially concerned, he said, because one of the more recent CWD-positive deer turned up as far north as Lilly in Cambria County and Altoona in Blair. That’s getting close to the elk herd, he noted.
“We need to be proactive,” Layton said.
Commissioner Jim Daley of Cranberry agreed. His first “knee jerk” reaction is he doesn’t like the idea of changing wildlife management unit boundaries, he said.
But the presence of wasting disease in the area makes this a special case, he said. Much like the commission treats some units, like 2B around Pittsburgh, with special rules, it may need to do the same here.
“To me, this makes a lot of sense,” Daley said.
At least one commissioner disagreed. Board president Brian Hoover of Delaware County said the 11 township area within disease management area 2 where the vast majority of CWD-positive deer has been found takes in about 430 square miles. He’s all for targeting deer removal there, he said.
But to throw open the door and aggressively remove deer throughout all of a new 4A disease management area means targeting thousands of square miles, he said. That would mean reducing the deer population “where we don’t have a single positive. We’re talking about a huge area,” Hoover said.
That will lead some to view this as just another “PGC conspiracy to eliminate the deer,” he said.
“I think the hunters are going to revolt,” he added.
Commission executive director Matt Hough said the additional removal of deer might amount to one animal per square mile. It would not leave no deer on the landscape, he added.
But either way, the agency can’t worry about that, Hough said. Wasting disease is too big a threat to the state’s deer and deer hunting heritage, he said.
“If we don’t do something we’re going to lose the game. There’s no more serious threat in the last 50 years in the commonwealth. It’s an issue we’ve got to get under control,” Hough said.
Changing the boundaries would impact other species, of course. Fall turkey seasons, extended bear seasons, fisher seasons and the like would have to be adjusted is parts of surrounding units were merged into 4A.
Laroche said he would talk to biologists managing those species to figure out what adjustments would need to be made.
Fighting CWD within a new 4A may involve taking some other steps, too.
Myers said one thing region staff would like to try is issuing “bonus” tags good for deer to hunters who shoot one in one of the 11 townships in Bedford and Blair counties that account for most of the CWD-positive deer discovered in the last four years. The prevalence of CWD there is more than twice as high as anywhere else, according to commission data.
Anyone who shoots a deer in those townships would be required to bring it to a check station to be tested, Myers said. For every deer they brought in, they could get a tag to get another, he suggested. There would be no limit.
He suggested the commission might want to operate the same system in the townships in a new 4A adjacent to the Maryland border. Wasting disease has been confirmed in several of the counties just over the line in that other state.
They represent an “artesian well” of potentially sick deer migrating into Pennsylvania, Myers said. He’d like to use hunters to keep them at bay, too.
Commissioners did not say whether they’d support that, but in the past they’ve said they wanted hunters rather than sharpshooters to be take out deer in those locations.
Laroche, though, said he still hopes to try using sharpshooters to take out family groups of deer yet this winter. His goal is to harvest deer in at least one location – at night, over bait – perhaps in March.
That’s how Illinois wildlife officials have successfully kept CWD from spreading in their state, he said.
The commission might also copy something else they’ve done in Illinois, Laroche said. That’s survey hunters and others not so much to find out what they know about wasting disease, but what steps they’d support to eradicate or at least control it.
Public support is vital, after all, Laroche said.
“If we don’t get support, in the long run, we’re doomed,” he said.
