When the deer numbers were high in the northern tier counties, people would come back to camp and say I’ve seen 20, 30, 40 deer. Kids now a days don’t want to come back to camp or home and say they didn’t see a deer all day. Great way to quickly lose interest.

Hunter numbers and youth retention numbers started declining well before antler restrictions. I remember going to camp in the late 70's early 80's and there would be cars lined up all along the roads in the ANF with people camping. By the late 80's early 90's there were hardly anybody camping.

100 yr leases were mainly on state forest land. I've heard of a couple of people losing them for various reasons. Doing things on the land, lease running out, even pipelines coming thru. There are still a lot of them in Elk county.

The ones that really got bit were the ones in the ANF. They just came in and blocked the roads to them, gave the people so long to get their stuff out, and then bulldozed them. There was a road full of them that paralleled Bear creek here in elk. One years they were standing for deer season. The next year for trout season they were gone.

I got my son interested in deer season real young. I have pics of him tracking a deer at 2. Little bugger was real good at tracking deer. We figure it was because he was so low to the ground he didn't have to bend over to look for blood. Even if I got one that dropped 20 yards from the shot site, I would go home and have him come out and look for the deer. He lives for deer season now. My youngest cousin (4 yrs younger than me) had no desire to hunt. As much as his dad tried to get him involved he wanted nothing to do with it. He wasn't against it. Just wanted nothing to do with hunting.

Thanks Elk, that must be the one I remembered. Do you know what happened, why they did that?

What's ANF land?


Allegheny national forest?

anf Allegheny National Forest
ar Antler Restrictions
hr Herd Reduction
bs Blinded by Science

Deers cause a lot of troubles.

The local bar/hotel was packed with hunters. Local people put up hunters for the week. (We had 7 hunters on our farm). The state game lands were loaded with hunters. Fast forward 20 years, poof all gone! Went to PA for early muzzleloader hunting, did not hear a shot or see another hunter.

C-22, No Idea. There one day gone the next. Quite a few of them were pretty run down, So that might've been part of it.

Hippie, ANF = Allegheny National Forest. It is considered the most endangered NF in the country. It's nothing but pipelines and wells. I had a friend who shut down all the wells on a 500 acre section of it accidentally. He was shooting across a valley and hit one of the major power lines running from the station to the wells. Lots of sparks. It took the well guys about 10 hours to get it back up and running. The next year they had orange triangles hanging from all the lines.