11-04-2004, 04:06 PM
First published: Thursday, October 28, 2004
Managing the state's abundance -- and in several areas superabundance -- of deer and black bears is requiring continual fiddling and fine-tuning.
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This is relatively new territory for our Department of Environmental Conservation, and it is clearly a work in progress.
There now is a need to find more doe shooters for the upcoming gun season to compensate for not enough license buyers successfully drawing antlerless permits. Between 8,000 and 10,000 leftover deer-management permits from around the state needed to meet biologists' harvest goals will be issued directly to applicants who were previously unsuccessful.
"You can't apply freshly for these," says Gerry Barnhart, director of the DEC's Division of Fish and Wildlife. "These will go to those who already applied but were denied."
But, hang on. In addition, first thing Monday morning at wherever you bought your license you can buy one of an additional 60,000 deer-management permits available statewide on a first-come, first-served basis.
But not so fast. Those permits are limited to 15 specific wildlife management units, most of them in the southern Hudson Valley and out west in regions 8 and 9. The only local unit affected is the Delmar archery-only unit, 4J. The other extra deer permits will be issued for Wildlife Management Units 1C, 3F, 3M, 3N, 3S, 8A, 8C, 8F, 8G, 8H, 8N, 8R, 9A and 9F.
To qualify, you must possess a big-game license. If you purchased a sportsman or supersportsman license, there's no extra fee to apply for one of these additional permits. Nor is there if you bought just a big-game hunting license but paid the $10 for a deer-management permit application initially. You will have to cough up the $10 now, however, if you didn't then.
Logic would dictate that the DEC is forced to issue more permits at the last minute like this because license sales are way down, but I'm told that is not the case. It has more to do with the probabilities built into the computer drawing process than with sales.
Although last year, Barnhart admits, deer-management permit applications were down about 80,000 from DEC expectations. That probably had something to do with the negative reports of winter deer kills from the brutal winter of the year before.
The deer take was indeed down somewhat in 2003 compared to the record-setting year before. Barnhart said license sales and deer-management application appear to have picked up this year.
Plus, considering the not overly difficult winter last year, the coming season looks pretty good.
Now a certain number of deer have to be killed in targeted areas. That's the hard, brutal truth. Else overcrowding will bring us problems in a hurry: overbrowsed habitat, sickly deer, agriculture, traffic accidents, suburban shrubbery, Lyme disease -- the list goes on and on. All the stuff Bambi never had to worry about.
Bears are a problem, too.
DEC big-game biologist Lou Berchielli says bear nuisance calls, especially down in the Catskills, are way up again this year.
What Bambi did to retard the public's acceptance of sensible deer management, cute and cuddly stuffed teddy bears have done to slow the needed public approval for culling the burgeoning bear population.
Right now, down in New Jersey there's a heck of a row over an on-again, off-again limited bear hunt scheduled for Dec. 6-11. New Jersey hasn't allowed bear hunting in years, a big mistake.
On Wednesday, a judge ordered the state's Department of Environmental Protection to accept bear permit applications, after a coalition of sportsmen brought suit. Earlier, DEP commissioner Bradley Campbell had barred his agency from accepting permit applications.
Northern New Jersey is rife with bruins, who, with total disregard for state sovereignty, are galumphing right across our border in record numbers along with spillovers from Pennsylvania.
At any rate, we have plenty of our bears to worry about, to the extent that the DEC would like to extend bear-hunting opportunities to additional areas in the Catskills throughout Delaware County and out west near and including Allegany State Park. Whether bear hunting would be allowed in the park is still not decided.
The growth of New York's black-bear population is certainly not as explosive as that of the white-tailed deer. Then again, one mature black bear can command quite a presence and upset a lot of beehives, bird feeders and garbage cans. Not to mention scare the gumption out of granny.
Biologists are not overly concerned at this point over too many bears.
"Many, many years of research tell us the harvest can be regulated by the timing of the season," Barnhart says.
At present, opening day for bear shooting lags the southern zone deer opener. If the DEC wants more bears out of the woods, coinciding the openers is likely to do it, Barnhart says.
Fred LeBrun's outdoors column is published Thursdays. To reach him, call 454-5453.
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