Photo: Game Commission

The Pennsylvania Game Commission has added new criteria it will use to guide the management of white-tailed deer in the Commonwealth.

This new approach, first identified in 2003 with the adoption of the current deer management plan, will lean heavily on data-collection and analysis to measure the quality of and changes to deer and forest habitat health to develop deer management recommendations for the agency's Board of Game Commissioners to consider.

"There has to be a solid scientific foundation from which deer management recommendations are made to ensure program integrity and to monitor change," emphasized Dr. Christopher Rosenberry, Game Commission Deer Management Section supervisor. "These measures will provide deer managers and Pennsylvanians more details - a clearer picture of what's going on. It is hoped that increased awareness will lead to a better understanding of deer impacts and deer management actions.

"These measurements support the agency's goals to manage for healthy deer, healthy forest habitat and reduced deer-human conflicts; goals that were first identified by representatives of various groups with an interest in deer management, including hunters, and subsequently adopted by the Game Commission as part of its deer management plan. When we finalize procedures for assessing deer conflicts with human activities, we'll have a much more complete assessment of what's going on in the whitetail's world and how it's impacting ours."

Cal DuBrock, Game Commission Bureau of Wildlife Management director, noted that managing whitetails has always been - and likely always will be - controversial because the views of Pennsylvanians interested in or trying to influence deer management are so different.

For example, in the past month, the House Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing in DuBois, Clearfield County, to collect public comment on the state's reduced deer populations, while testimony before the House Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee in the Capitol focused on information that deer are causing upwards of $150 million in damages annually to Pennsylvania farming, forestry and nursery industries.

"Establishing what are socially-acceptable deer population goals for the state's Wildlife Management Units (WMUs) system is about as uncomplicated as establishing the best way to reduce property taxes in the Commonwealth or solving the Social Security debate throughout the nation," DuBrock said. "There is always one group of stakeholders that wants what another doesn't, creating extremes that cannot or refuse to find middle ground."

From a management perspective, this uncompromising arrangement regularly places the Game Commission in the unfortunate position of being in one extreme - or the other's - crosshairs, DuBrock noted.

"We do strive to accommodate all Pennsylvanians - as well as habitat and other wildlife species - in our deer management deliberations and recommendations," DuBrock said. "And now with measures of deer and forested habitat health, we are positioned to further refine that approach."

The strategies for collecting and analyzing deer health information will involve using reproductive data - embryos per doe and fawn pregnancy rates - from each Wildlife Management Unit to evaluate trends in deer health.

"Reproduction was chosen as a primary measure for deer health because research has repeatedly shown there are differences in the reproductive rates of females in good physical condition and those in poor physical condition," Rosenberry explained. "Research also has confirmed that as a deer population's size increases, its reproductive rates decline. In fact, female fawns often stop breeding when deer populations are high."

Under the guidelines of the new measures, deer health would be gauged as good when 30 percent or more of fawns are bred; when two-year-old females have 1.5 fawns or more; and when females three-years-or-older have 1.7 fawns or more.

"Reproductive measures have been used in other states to assess the nutritional plane and/or physical condition of deer," Rosenberry noted. "Adding it to our new monitoring system's mix of measurements is just another way to strengthen our deer management recommendations."

Habitat - or specifically, forest acreage and age - has been used by the Game Commission for decades as a foundation to help establish deer population goals. Under the refined habitat measures, monitoring will examine forest sustainability.

"A healthy forest can sustain deer, as well as a variety of plant and animal life, and replace its losses," pointed out Rosenberry. "So, we decided one way to gauge a forest's well-being would be to measure its ability to replace itself. In other words, are there enough young trees in a forest to replace older trees when they die, are harvested for timber, or are damaged by natural causes, such as windstorms."

Under the guidelines of the new measures, forest habitat health would be gauged as good when at least 70 percent of sampled plots had adequate regeneration to replace the current forest canopy.

The state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, U.S. Forest Service, and Pennsylvania State University already collect tree seedling and sapling data from public and private lands in all WMUs as part of an ongoing "forest inventory analysis." Only plots where enough light reaches the forest floor to support growth of tree seedling and saplings are included in this analysis.

The deer and habitat health measures the Game Commission has integrated into Pennsylvania's deer management program have been reviewed by other wildlife biologists and foresters, including professionals from the Northeast Deer Technical Committee, a group of deer biologists from all northeastern states and some Canadian provinces; Penn State University; Pennsylvania Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit; state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources; U.S. Forest Service; and the Quality Deer Management Association.

"As we gain more experience with these measures and gather additional information, we will continue to refine them so we are making deer management recommendations based on the best assessments of deer and forest habitat health in Pennsylvania," Rosenberry said. "It's what scientific wildlife management is all about, and what Pennsylvanians should expect from the Game Commission."

More information on deer and forest habitat measures can be found on the Game Commission's website

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