Analyzing The Deer Harvest Figures

With hunters now purchasing their hunting licenses and their antlerless deer tags, it might be a good time to take a look at last year’s Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC) harvest estimates.

Based on a total of 134,000 harvest reports from Pennsylvania hunters, the PGC deer biologists have come up with a total harvest of 430,010 animals for the 2023-2024 deer-hunting seasons. This includes an estimated 171,600 bucks and 258,410 antlerless deer for the year. As you can see, the PGC biologists have essentially tripled the reported harvest. Their estimate shows a 2% increase over the previous year.

Bowhunters accounted for about a third of this total, with an incredible estimated 83,370 bucks and 71,480 antlerless deer being harvested. If you look at this on a county level, with Blair County being an average county, that means about 1,243 bucks were taken in Blair County. I have a hard time wrapping my head around that figure.

In our Wildlife Management Unit, 4A, we supposedly killed a total of 5700 bucks and 9300 antlerless deer. These figures were up 1900 and 1800 animals respectively from the year before.

Deer and Elk Section Supervisor David Stainbrook said that harvest estimates are calculated using reports from hunters in combination with deer checked by 31 teams of trained deer agers who visited more than 400 processors across the state during the firearms deer season. The biologists then calculate the estimated harvest.

I am no math wizard, as Donna can tell you from the egregious errors I have made in our checking account register; but independent wildlife researcher John Eveland is. Eveland has written that the PGC’s figures are impossible to sustain. He calculates that we would need to have a deer herd in excess of 1.7 million animals, or 65 deer per forested square mile, to sustain a harvest of 430,000 deer. He continues, “According to basic deer biology, if the Commission’s harvest figures were correct, then the herd would have been completely exterminated from the Commonwealth midway through the 2007 hunting season – zero deer in the state. From 2008 to the present, the agency would have been killing an annually increasing deficit of deer that would have reached minus 5,474,406 deer by the spring of 2024. Put another way, the agency would have had to import 5,474,406 deer from other states during 2008-23 and shoot every one of them.”

At any rate, lots of deer are killed in Pennsylvania. You have to decide whether or not to accept the commission’s figures or to edge toward Eveland’s analysis.