Hunter shatters Pennsylvania record with non-typical buck

Few hunters ever will have an experience like this one.

Eric Carns of Hesston in Huntingdon County was out with his crossbow Nov. 5, on family property in Clearfield County. He was on the ground when a deer spooked by his father ran to within 20 yards of him. He made a quick decision to shoot.

Good move.

The buck's rack had 26 points and a 196/8-inch spread. This past week, it was certified as the new state record nontypical archery buck. It scored 2286/8.

The previous record was an Allegheny County deer killed in 2007 that scored 209 ¹⁄₈.

What's more, Carns' buck ranks as the No. 3 nontypical in state history even when considering deer taken with firearms. The only two bigger bucks were one taken in 1942 that scored 2386/8 and one taken in 2001 that scored 2302/8.

“I've scored maybe a handful of deer over 200 inches. But that's the biggest I've ever scored,” said Bob D'Angelo, state records program coordinator for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

“It had everything — the points, the length, the mass.”

What made it score so well, he said, were its odd points. It had 13 on each side and was symmetrical that way. But each of the main points had another coming off them. They added nearly 51 inches to the rack's score.

“That's just tremendous. That just piled on the points,” D'Angelo said.

Carns himself hasn't said much. He asked the commission not hand out his contact information.

Tracked down anyway, he did not return any of several phone calls.

His only comments, in fact, were those made to WTAJ-TV, an Altoona television station.

“I shot a 10-point last year and got it mounted. It was 20 inches wide,” Carns told WTAJ. “This year's just makes it look small.”

His deer was the cream of what has apparently been an excellent crop across Pennsylvania. D'Angelo said large-racked bucks have become commonplace in recent years, with this past season especially good.

“A 140-class deer, I don't even get excited anymore. Although I've never killed one that big myself, I don't get excited when they come in to be scored because I see them all the time,” D'Angelo said.

That's the trend all across the country, it seems.

This past fall, a hunter in Tennessee killed what is now officially the new world record nontypical. It scored 312 ³⁄₈.

There have been media reports, too, of possible state-record deer being taken in Minnesota, Mississippi and Louisiana, where not one but two hunters might have broken the state's 70-year-old whitetail record.

While all those deer have yet to be certified, there's no doubt there are plenty of big bucks on the landscape these days.

That's not by accident, said Johnathan Bordelon, deer program manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

To reach their potential antler-wise, bucks need to live relatively long lives, he said. Once, hunters didn't permit that.

In 1981 in Louisiana, for example, Bordelon said, yearling bucks made up 80 percent of the annual harvest.

Now, things have flipped completely. Eighty percent of the harvest typically is made up of deer at least 2 ¹⁄₂ years old, these days, and 67 percent 3 ¹⁄₂ years, he said.

“Older-age harvest has allowed deer to grow larger and reach their growth potential. The result has been an increase in the number of large bucks harvested,” Bordelon said.

Much the same thing has happened in Pennsylvania.

In 2015, more than half of the bucks killed in Pennsylvania were 2 ¹⁄₂ years or older. Mandatory antler restrictions that require hunters to pass on smaller, younger bucks partly explain that and are also the “most obvious” reason so many big bucks are showing up, said Chris Rosenberry, the Game Commission's chief deer biologist.

Those older deer grow larger antlers, he said.

But there's more to it than that, at least nationally.

Louisiana has some of the longest deer seasons in the country and no mandatory antler restrictions, for example.

“The increase in age structure is tied to hunter desires,” Bordelon said. “Long seasons have provided hunters a long window in which to be selective.”

At the same time, increasing numbers of hunters have come to grips with the idea that the key to large, healthy, big-racked deer is maintaining whitetails in “appropriate numbers,” said Adam Murkowski, big game program leader for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources' division of fish and wildlife.

That can mean fewer deer than in decades past, he said.

“But I think a lot of hunters are coming to realize that the answer to growing big bucks is not to increase the size of the whole pyramid and hope to get a few more big ones at the top,” Murkowski said.

“It's to maintain that appropriate number of deer. You get more big bucks as a result of that.”

Still, bucks as large as the one Carns took will always be rare, D'Angelo said. It was, he said, “incredible.”

But every hunter who heads out can hope. Sometimes, he said, that's all it takes.

“You hate to say it, but a lot of these are just luck,” D'Angelo said.

Bob Frye is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at bfrye@tribweb.com or via @bobfryeoutdoors.

PA Game Commission Pheasant Chick And Egg Program Comes To An End

HARRISBURG, PA - Two long-running programs that enabled groups and individuals to

raise pheasants for release in their local areas have come to an end due to financially driven changes to the Game Commission’s pheasant propagation program.

The Pheasant Chick Program, started in 1933, provided day-old pheasant chicks free of charge to sportsmen’s organizations with approved propagation facilities. And the Day-Old Pheasant Hen Chick and Surplus Egg Programs enabled properly permitted organizations and individuals to buy chicks and eggs to raise and release.

Each of the programs served to augment the pheasant releases the Game Commission conducts each year before and during the pheasant hunting season. The birds that went to sportsmen's organizations were released on lands open to public hunting.

In an effort to cut costs, however, the Game Commission is implementing changes to its pheasant propagation program. The agency recently announced the closure of two pheasant farms, and will rely on the remaining two farms for all production. In closing the farms, the agency has also released birds that would have been kept as breeding stock.

Rather than raising chicks from the eggs laid by these birds, the agency will purchase day-old chicks from a privately owned breeder, and raise those birds for release.

Purchasing chicks is more cost-effective. And in making the switch and eliminating 14 positions that had been held by game-farm workers, the agency expects to save $1.5 million in the coming year.

The Board of Game Commissioners also is discussing creation of a $25 permit that would be required for all adult pheasant hunters, and would further help pay for Pennsylvania’s propagation program.

The application period for pheasant egg and chick programs traditionally opened in January.

Organizations and individuals that had planned on taking part in the program in 2017 might still be able to obtain pheasant eggs from private propagators.

Unlike most state agencies, the Pennsylvania Game Commission in not funded by tax dollars. It relies primarily on revenue generated through the purchase of hunting and furtaker licenses – the fees for which are set by the General Assembly and have not been adjusted for inflation in nearly two decades.

“Cost-cutting measures, like the changes we’re implementing to the pheasant propagation program are necessary to balance the agency’s budget until a license-fee increase finally is approved,” said R. Matthew Hough, the Game Commission’s executive director. “We’ve had to make a lot of difficult decisions in recent years, and a lot of them probably went unnoticed because initially we cut in areas we knew would have the least impact on those who rely on the services we offer. But as we’re forced to make bigger and more significant cuts at the program level, there’s no avoiding the impact to services. Unfortunately, more cuts will be needed to balance the budget for the coming fiscal year, and Pennsylvania’s citizens and wildlife resources have begun feeling the impact.”

Fisher Resurgence: Once extinct in Pennsylvania forests, a big active predator is on the rebound

By Ben Moyer / Special to the Post-Gazette

The fisher, Pennsylvania’s second-largest member of the weasel family (the river otter is largest), is poorly named. “Mouser” or “squirreler” might be better.

Although fishers prey on diverse food sources, fish are not part of their diet. Small rodents, rabbits, squirrels and carrion make up much of the menu, and fishers are effective predators of porcupines where that prey is available. But biologists who have worked to re-establish the fisher, once extinct in Pennsylvania, concede it will eat almost any wild creature that doesn’t eat it first.

“In fishers, we’ve seen the most diverse diet, including each other, of all forest predators; there’s nothing they won’t eat,” said Matt Lovallo, wildlife biologist in the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s Game Mammals Section. “With some food items like deer, whether it’s predation or scavenging, we don’t know. We do understand that hunters have an intuitive concern about turkeys because fishers are skilled tree climbers, but birds are very limited among the food items we’ve analyzed.”

The name fisher has roots in the older French word “fichet,” which applied to the polecat, a European weasel. Known to scientists as Martes pennanti, fishers are weasel-like in appearance but larger, cloaked in dark brown to black fur, sometimes brindled with white or silver. Big males can exceed 4 feet from snout to tail tip with the heavily furred tail accounting for about a third of the total length. The sharply triangular head is topped with short rounded ears. Adult males generally range between 9 to 12 pounds, with the largest specimens nearly doubling that weight. Females are smaller.

Question

Should the state Game Commission invest resources into restoring extirpated wildlife or focus on improving conditions for Pennsylvania hunters?

50%

Restoring wildlife

14%

Improving hunting

36%

Both

Fishers are forest-dependent and currently range all across Canada’s forest belt, but their original distribution embraced the Great Lakes and extended southward along the Rocky and Appalachian mountain chains. As native Appalachian and Midwestern forests were cleared in the 19th century, fishers disappeared from the region. But as second-growth woodland reclaimed much of the landscape, biologists in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New York, Michigan and Wisconsin sought to re-establish fishers in those states.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission’s Fisher Management Plan states that West Virginia released fishers captured in New Hampshire as early as 1969. New York followed in the 1980s by re-locating fishers from a remnant Adirondack population to other forested tracts. Most significantly, between 1994 and 1998, Game Commission biologists working cooperatively with Frostburg University released 190 fishers at six heavily forested sites across northern Pennsylvania. Fishers have been sighted, crushed on highways and caught accidentally in traps with increasing frequency ever since.

“Fisher reintroductions have been a success across the Northeast and Midwest, maybe at a quicker rate than we expected,” Lovallo said. “Although we released fishers in northern Pennsylvania, and they’re doing well, we believe the growing population in southwestern counties is a result of range expansion from West Virginia.”

Biologists know that fisher populations are growing and spreading within the state because they monitor legal trapping harvests, survey trappers to track incidental fisher captures and document road-kills.

The Fisher Management Plan reports that between 2001 and 2008 the number of fishers trapped incidentally rose from one to 105. The Game Commission’s Wildlife Management Unit 2C comprising mountainous Somerset, Fayette, Westmoreland, Indiana and Cambria counties accounted for nearly half of the 2008 total.

“Since we wrote that plan in 2008 the number of incidental captures has climbed to over 1,000 today,” Lovallo said.

Lovallo explained that incidental captures are fishers caught unintentionally by trappers targeting other species such as fox or raccoon, or trapped outside wildlife management units open to legal fisher trapping. Trappers are required to release these fishers unharmed if possible.

Since 2010 the Game Commission has regulated a limited trapping season (Dec. 17-28 in 2016) for fishers across 13 wildlife management units including WMUs 1B, 2C and 2D in Western Pennsylvania. Only one fisher may be taken per year and trappers must have a fisher permit.

“About 6 percent of our trappers with a fisher permit are successful. That rate has remained amazingly consistent since we started the season,” Lovallo said. “For example, [in 2015] 6,564 permit holders trapped 401 fishers in units with an open season.”

Jim Griffith, a veteran trapper from Somerset who also works as a fur receiving agent for Fur Harvesters Auction Inc. of North Bay, Ontario, has caught fishers in wide-ranging locations.

“I travel a lot buying fur and I trap in a lot of places,” Griffith said. “I’ll never forget the first thing I caught in a cable restraint in Pennsylvania was a fisher. Of course, I let it go because that was before we had a season. I carry a noose-pole and I slip the noose over one leg, stretch them out so they can’t bite and release them. Away they go.

“Being an aggressive predator, fishers are fairly easy to trap,” Griffith continued. “When the Canadians trap beaver in the remote bush they skin them on-site and take just the pelt. If a fisher gets on that beaver carcass it won’t leave it, even if it has to fight wolves.”

Griffith said signs of renewed interest in American fur from Chinese and Russian buyers, fisher pelts included, is encouraging news for local trappers and the fur market, .

“Right now, prices are as low as I’ve ever seen,” Griffith said. “But I’m optimistic and it can only go up from here. Not long ago a prime female fisher brought $200. Today, maybe $60 or $70.”

Female pelts fetch better prices than male fishers because the female’s fur is softer and silkier, Griffith explained.

Griffith’s top tip for trapping fishers?

“Use skunk scent as your lure. Fishers love it,” Griffith offered. “Around here, where you mainly find fisher is in heavy woods with hemlock or spruce where they can get red squirrels, but they have adapted well to all types of woodland.”

When asked to explain biologists’ motivation in re-introducing an opportunistic predator like the fisher, Lovallo doesn’t hesitate.

“The reality is that we had fishers in great numbers prior to the 1900s. Part of [the Game Commission’s] agency mission is to maintain and restore wildlife populations,” Lovallo reflected. “We’ve restored many such as elk, otter, eagle and beaver. Other large predators like wolves and mountain lions we’ve lost and probably never will get back, unless they do it on their own.”

Ben Moyer is a freelance writer from Farmington, Pa.

2017 Winter Trap League Schedule

Fight the Winter blues by coming out for the Winter trap league every Sunday starting January 8th 2017.  

This league rotates between Frazer Sportsman, West View Sportsmen and Bull Creek Rod and Gun Club. Sign-ups are from 10:00AM to 3:00PM.  League fee is $10.00 per week to shoot 50 targets from 16 yards.  Practice is $7.00 and and junior shooters (under 18) are $7.00! To be eligible for the banquet you must make 9 of 12 shoots. The top 7 scores will be counted each week for team honors.

January 8th at Frazier 
January 15th at West View
January 22nd at Bull Creek
January 29th at Frazier 
February 5th at West View (Super Bowl)
February 12th at Bull Creek
February 19th at Frazier
February 26th at West View
March 5th at Bull Creek
March 12th at Frazier
March 19th at West View
March 26 th at Bull Creek
TBD(Saturday) Banquet at Bull Creek

National Wild Turkey Federation Annual Banquet January 27th, 2017

Hunter numbers down on opening day of PA deer season, but it remains busiest day

BY BOB FRYE

The Pennsylvania Game Commission is trying to avoid any confusion.

On Nov. 14, state lawmakers sent House Bill 263 — which removes the prohibition on hunting with semiautomatic and air rifles in Pennsylvania — to Gov. Tom Wolf for his signature. He signed it into law at Act 168 last Monday.

However, that doesn't mean hunters can take a semiautomatic rifle into the woods this deer season.

The commission still has to develop regulations for semiautos, determining things like in which seasons they can be used, what calibers are acceptable, the maximum magazine capacity for those guns and more.

The goal, according to the agency, is to spell that all out in time for the 2017-18 license year. In the meantime, though, semiauto rifles aren't permitted in the woods statewide.

This deer season, centerfire rifles “must be manually operated.”

“The only exception is that semiautomatic shotguns may be used to hunt deer in five counties — Allegheny, Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery — that are defined as special regulations areas,” the commission said in a statement. “Semiautomatic rifles generally are not permitted for any type of hunting in any part of the state at this time.”

Meanwhile, hunters who go afield in any of the state's designated “disease management areas,” are being reminded of the special rules pertaining to moving deer parts.

“Hunters may not remove from any DMA any deer parts deemed to have a high-risk of transmitting (chronic wasting disease). The head, backbone and spinal cord are among those high-risk parts, and successful hunters who live outside a DMA can remove and deposit high-risk parts in dumpsters that have been set up on state game lands within each DMA. They then can transport the meat and other low-risk parts outside the DMA,” a commission news release reads.

Hunters also can take their harvests to a processor or taxidermist within the DMA. A list of those can be found at http://pagame.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=cf5aa9463b464dcebefaff06b451edd0.

As for getting an individual deer tested for wasting disease, hunters can contact the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture's Veterinary Laboratory. There is a fee for testing. Information is available at agriculture.pa.gov.

— Bob Fry

There is no question in Jim Daley's mind.

The Cranberry man, who serves as a member of the Pennsylvania Game Commission board, will be in the woods on Monday morning for opening day of the statewide firearms deer season. It's the same way he has spent every Monday after Thanksgiving for decades.

Neither his dad nor grandfather will be there this year; both have passed away. His son will be missing, too, in college in Texas.

So he most likely will be going it alone. But go it he will.

“For a lot of old guys like me, it's in your lifeblood. It's almost inbred,” Daley said.

“You'd sort of have to be on your deathbed not to go.”

That's still the case for the majority of Pennsylvania hunters anyway. The first day of deer season remains the busiest hunting day of the year.

“Every year we just get surges of people coming in getting ready for opening day,” said Zack Prugh of 4K Outdoors, a sporting goods store in Elderton.

That's how things were on Friday for sure. The store was jumping with hunters, he said.

“We're pretty busy right now. They're looking for everything from knives to ammunition to scopes to guns.”

And yet, things aren't what they once were.

At one time, less than a decade ago, opening day put upwards of 750,000 hunters in the woods. This year the commission estimated the opening day crowd will number closer to 550,000.

There are thought to be several reasons for that, not the least of which being there are fewer hunters now than in the past. In 1982, according to the commission, Pennsylvania had an estimated 1.2 million hunters. Now license sales are closer to 900,000.

The growth of archery hunting is a factor, too.

“Participation in the firearms deer season has been trending downward in recent years as the archery deer season has become more popular with hunters, and more deer are taken in the archery season, before the firearms deer season begins,” reads a commission news release.

“Archery license sales have increased annually since 2007. And in the 2015-16 seasons, deer harvested during archery seasons accounted for 31 percent of the overall deer harvest.”

Deer are more widespread than they once were, too, added Game Commissioner Bob Schlemmer of Export. When he was a youngster in Punxsutawney in the 1950s, he said, there were no deer around locally. Hunters — from across Pennsylvania and other nearby states — flocked to the “big woods” where they did exist.

“You could not pull out on Main Street in Emporium on the weekend before deer season, there were so many cars,” Schlemmer said. “If you were on a side street, forget it.

“But that's all changed.”

With longer deer season providing opportunities to chase whitetails throughout fall, and deer spread out to the point that they're sometimes more numerous in the suburbs than elsewhere, and people's work and social schedules different, opening day of the season is different than the “old days.”

“Human dimensions have changed completely,” Schlemmer said.

There still is value in going out from a harvest standpoint, though.

According to commission figures, hunters killed 315,813 deer in the 2015-16 seasons. That was about 4 percent more than the year before. The buck kill — 137,580 animals — was up 15 percent over the year before.

Twenty-seven percent of all those deer — and 47 percent of all those bucks — were killed on opening day, alone.

Beyond that, opening day remains important for other reasons, said Matt Hough, the commission's executive director.

“It's a tradition that's about more than just harvesting deer. It's about family and friends enjoying the outdoors together. Moreover, it's what being a Pennsylvanian is all about,” he said.

Jason Beck of Monessen, president of the National Pike Branch of the Quality Deer Management Association, agreed. He will spend opening day hunting with his wife, Elainna.

Lots of other hunters likewise will be in the woods with family members and friends, he said. That's how things will always be, no matter changing seasons, deer populations, demographics and more, he predicted.

“I believe there's a core group of individuals who hold it dear to their hearts and go out for all the right reasons. They'll always keep it going,” Beck said.

“It's not all about the horns. It's relationships, it's what keeps us together. It's still important to us.”

Bob Frye is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at bfrye@tribweb.com or via @bobfryeoutdoors.

Movements, subtle or blatant, can signal a deer’s intentions

By John Hayes / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Ambling slowly through the brush as it browses, the deer’s ears are drooped, its tail swaying lazily from side to side. It stops, rigid and motionless, then bobs its head horizontally. Twice, the deer lowers its head to the ground and snaps it up again. It snorts and stomps.

What is the deer’s next move?

More to the point, at this juncture in the deer-human encounter, what is the smartest next move that a hunter could make?

In eight days, nearly a million hunters will participate in Pennsylvania’s statewide firearm deer season. For many, success will depend on their understanding of whitetail behavior. Just as a deer “sees” with its nose, it signals its intentions through movements. Hunters can increase their chance of success by reading that body language.

Everyone knows what a raised white tail means. How about when the tail is slowly wagging?

“Does do that. It can mean she’s emitting her scent in estrus. Sometimes they call that ‘squatting tail,’” said Marshall Muntz of Allison Park, a longtime hunter and assistant manager at the new Gander Mountain outfitter in Monroeville. “I look for that from a doe, and then look for buck to follow.”

A wagging tail can tell another story. Some hunters read it as a sign of contentedness commonly made when a deer is feeding and feeling safe. Either way, a wagging tail is a sign that the hunter has not been spotted.

During the rut, when a hormonally driven urge to reproduce overrides all else, hunters are the last thing on a deer’s mind. A whitetail exhibiting rutting behavior is most likely preoccupied with sexual desire and unaware that it’s in somebody’s crosshairs.

“Have you seen the lip curl, when a buck’s lower lip curls out over its mouth?” asked Muntz. “The tongue is lapping, the nostrils are flared. That deer is so into scenting a doe it has no idea [a hunter] is around.”

In male and female deer, the rut activates the vomeronasal organ. Located in the sinus cavity, its sensory neurons detect airborne non-vaporized chemical compounds that normally can not be detected by smell — primarily pheromones from the urine and excretions of does in estrus. All that lip curling, nostril flaring and tongue lapping is intended to force a whiff of the sexually stimulating scent over the olfactory organ.

“Another rutting behavior is called ‘bird dogging,’” said Muntz. “You’ll see a buck running with its nose straight to the ground following a doe.”

Sometimes a hot doe will be bird-dogged by more than one buck at a time. If the first rack is small, a hunter might gamble and wait for a bigger bird-dogging suitor.

Some deer movements suggest confusion, or at least uncertainty.

“Ears are a dead set giveaway,” said Muntz. “It’s the first thing I look at after counting [antler points] for three up. If the ears are kind of hanging low and relaxed, the deer is content and has no clue it’s being watched. But if they’re straight up or twisting left and right, it’s really paying attention. It knows something is wrong and is ‘looking’ for it with its ears.”

Whether it’s rutting season or not, when a deer arches its back and the ribeye hairs stand on end, look out. That deer is fighting mad and ready to attack.

Sometimes the absence of movement can give away the animal’s intention. A deer that turns mostly broadside to a perceived threat isn’t offering a better target. It’s trying to make itself appear larger and more threatening to a potential adversary.

“When a deer stops dead solid, it’s trying to not be marked,” said Muntz. “It knows something’s going on but doesn’t know what. When it freezes, the hunter should freeze or [he or she] will be busted.”

Moving its head from side to side, the deer is attempting to get a better three-dimensional impression of what’s out there.

“The worst thing a hunter could do at that moment is move,” said Muntz.

Unable to identify the danger, a deer may try to get the hidden adversary to move. Snorting is an attempt to get the threat to respond, revealing its location. (Not to be confused with the male deer’s snort-wheeze. Sometimes called a “snot shot,” it’s a form of aggressive nose blowing intended to intimidate a rival.)

“When a deer stomps, it’s a challenge. It’s frustrated that it knows you’re there but doesn’t know what you are,” said Muntz. “Sometimes when a big doe feels threatened, it will throw its head to the ground and snap it back up several times.”

How should a hunter respond?

Shoot. Presuming that safety, legal and range considerations have been confirmed and the hunter wants this deer, the aggressive head bobbing signals that the animal is seconds from running off. Shoot before the deer, and the opportunity, are gone.