How Much Is Enough?

The door of the one-room schoolhouse burst open with a bang, quieting in an instant the normal before-class chatter. Goosebumps rose on the flesh of the students, in part because of the icy blade of cold air that knifed through the room.

More than that, though, it was the look on the face of their classmate. Eyes wide, hair askew from ripping off his cap, out of breath from running through the snow, he was stammering, the words running together like water droplets over a falls.

Charlie May was one of the students who turned to see what the stir was about. Only minutes before, he had settled into his seat after hanging his coat on a peg by the door. It was just before Christmas 1931 and there were several inches of snow on the ground.

That hadn’t kept May from walking to school, of course. It was only a few miles from home, and he was all but a man anyway. Fifteen and in eighth grade, his last year of school, he’d soon be leaving books behind to join the rest of the men in Gowan City, Schuylkill County, in working for the Reading Coal Company. His relative maturity left him immune to some of the crises that occasionally sent his younger classmates into a frenzy. This was to be something different, though.

“Hey! Hey everybody! You’ll never guess what I just saw!” yelled the excited youngster at the door behind him. “I saw a deer track!”

It took a second for this to sink in, and then the room was on fire with excitement. Just imagine, a white-tailed deer track, and in the snow on the same road the children walked to school every day! It was almost unthinkable. Even the teacher—whose first instinct must have been to put down the sudden disturbance before it led to general mayhem—got caught up in the pandemonium.

“Get your coats on, everyone,” the teacher said. “We’re going to go see it.”

“It seems funny now, but my dad said the whole class walked about a mile in the snow just to see that track—it wasn’t even a deer, just a track—because it was unheard of,” said Charlie May, the same-named son of that Schuylkill County teenager. “I remember my dad telling me that was one of the few times he ever saw a deer track as a kid, and he was in the woods a lot, more than most. There just weren’t many deer back in those days.”

I was thinking of that story as I pulled the minivan over to the edge of the road. It was an August evening, seven decades removed from Charlie May’s last year of school, and the air was just beginning to cool. My wife, Mandy, and I had weathered the afternoon heat by swimming with our sons, Derek and Tyler, in the lake at Laurel Hill State Park, in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Laurel Mountains. When we left, an hour or so before dark, we decided that rather than head straight home, we would detour on some side roads to look for deer.

Now we were parked on the edge of the two-lane blacktop, the driver’s-side tires in the gravel, watching a six-point buck. It was the sixth or seventh deer we’d seen so far, but the first with antlers. It had crossed the road in front of us from right to left, inexplicably leaving the security of Forbes State Forest for a forty-yard strip of greenery that stood between us and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a cross-state, four-lane superhighway. It was just inside the tree line, peering back at us over its shoulder. Derek, then age nine, and Tyler, then age six, craned their necks to get a better look.

“Can we unbuckle?” Tyler asked, frustrated by his inability to get closer to the window on the deer’s side because of the restrictions of his seat belt.

We saw a truck coming toward us and tried to catch the driver’s eye, hoping to alert him to the buck’s presence. I’m not sure he knew what we were trying to tell him—he slowed only a little—but fortunately the buck never moved.

We stayed another minute, then left when it seemed we might be the reason he was staying so still, so close to the road. If that deer was going to get hit by a vehicle, we didn’t want to cause it, and we certainly didn’t want to see it.

We continued through that state forest area, swung by some game lands managed for wildlife by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, then drove along a few roads at the base of the Laurel Ridge, where houses are sandwiched between the road and the woods. Having chosen the air conditioning of our minivan over the extra ground clearance of our Wrangler earlier in the day, we stayed on the pavement now.

Still, in that final hour of daylight we saw thirty-nine deer, not an unusual number by any means. Only that one was a buck—a telling fact at the time—but we saw several spotted fawns, including one set of triplets and two sets of twins. We saw some fat, healthy-looking deer. We saw a doe or two that seemed gaunt. We saw so many deer of so many kinds that before our trip was over Derek and Tyler had tired of watching them. “Uh-huh,” they’d say without lifting their heads when Mandy or I would say, “there’s one!” or “there’s a bunch!”

“Would we have been home already if we went straight there?” I heard Tyler ask.

“Yeah, we’ve been driving for an hour, and it takes an hour to get home from the park, so we’d have been there by now. But mom and dad want to look for deer,” Derek said, before going back to looking at the dog encyclopedia that he carried with him everywhere we went that summer.

Both kids love animals, both love to go for hikes, both look forward to tagging along with Dad in hunting season. If they’re the first to spot a deer, they brag about how good their eyes are. But deer are everywhere, and they see them all the time. Coop them up in the van for more than an hour, and the novelty of spotting whitetails loses its appeal.

If that might have shocked Charlie May in 1931, it doesn’t shock his son today. The younger May spent about thirty years working as a wildlife conservation officer with the Game Commission, serving in Fayette County, in the state’s deer-rich southwestern corner. During that time he was in the woods more than most, as his wiry frame and tanned skin attest. The difference is that the younger May enjoyed, each day, the potential to see more deer in a single afternoon than his dad could ever have imagined.

“Seeing deer today for a lot of people is like seeing cows,” May said. “They’re everywhere. Unless someone sees a really, really big buck, they don’t even mention it to me anymore.”

While Derek and Tyler and May’s neighbors might take all of those deer for granted today, their counterparts just a few generations couldn’t do the same. Pennsylvania is a big state by eastern standards, comprising forty-five thousand square miles divided into sixty-seven counties. Yet in 1916, about the time the elder May was born, hunters killed only 1,722 deer, all bucks. In 1931 the statewide harvest was still less than a hundred thousand.

Today, drivers kill that many or more on the roads each year. Hunters take another four hundred thousand annually, and still the deer population was thought to be something like 1.6 million animals heading into the fall of 2003.

At first glance, it’s hard to consider this population explosion anything but a wonderful development, especially in Pennsylvania, which has considered the white-tailed deer its state animal since 1955. Whitetails are unquestionably beautiful. Watching one bound across a field in great leaps, its signature white tail held high, or dodge and weave through an oak forest, you can’t help but wonder at their combination of form and function. Does have the deep brown eyes and long lashes of a movie starlet. Bucks, especially those in the rut, have a primeval masculinity about them that bespeaks raw power. They’re lithe, fleet, and have the grace of a Baryshnikov. Just about everyone, hunter or nonhunter, likes to see them. What both sexes share, though—and this is what makes them so potentially devastating—is the ability to destroy the very habitat they rely on to survive.

“Deer are second only to humans in their impact on a forest ecosystem,” says Dr. Gary Alt, head of the Game Commission’s deer management section and the man responsible for recommending when and how to control deer numbers. “They can, and will, dictate what other animals will survive there.” The trick for Alt and biologists like him all around the country is not figuring out how to manage deer. That’s relatively simple. The trick is figuring out how to manage the people who love deer. That’s much harder.

Ask how many deer are enough and the answer you get may vary widely, depending on whether it’s a hunter or a farmer or a forester or a homeowner doing the talking. When people as often as not want to manage deer populations based on values and desires instead of the amount of available habitat, the right answer is not always the popular one.

Dr. Joseph Kalbfus, a dentist by day who served as the Game Commission’s first executive director, knew as much nearly a century ago. Speaking in 1917, he said that the biologist or executive who tried to manage deer based more on science than on social pressures was in for a fight.

“Thank God I won’t be in charge of this work 10 years from now, because someone is going to have hell to pay,” Kalbfus wrote. How right he was. Almost ninety years later the job of managing deer on the basis of their impact on habitat, and not on how many animals people want to see, remains a challenge.

“I’ve been on the [Game Commission] board for years, and I see no organization standing in line to take on deer management in Pennsylvania,” says Steve Mohr, until recently a commissioner from Lancaster County. “It’s no small task.”

It is, though, perhaps the most important task facing the agency at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In Kalbfus’s day, few people, other than the hunters who went to the woods in search of them, interacted with deer. Today, each and every one of the state’s 13 million residents is likely to see or be affected by deer somewhere along the line. That’s raised the stakes considerably.

Vern Ross, executive director of the Game Commission, knew as much when he persuaded Alt to dive into the deer debate. Ross said then that deer management was “the issue that would decide the future of the Pennsylvania Game Commission and the future of hunting in Pennsylvania.” Bruce Smith, the York County Republican who chairs the Game and Fisheries Committee in the state House of Representatives, agreed when he said that “deer hunters and deer management can make or break the Pennsylvania Game Commission.”

These are pretty dramatic statements, but they’re also probably close to the mark. After all, it was the decimation of the state’s deer herd that in large part sparked the formation of the Game Commission. And it’s the debate over deer that may very well determine what happens to the agency in the future.

To understand what could happen in the future, though, it’s necessary to first take a look at the past. History shows that there was no shortage of deer in Pennsylvania when the first European settlers arrived. The Keystone State was home to wildlife of all kinds—deer, elk, turkeys, even caribou and bison—in great abundance.

“The food the woods yield is your elks, deer, raccoons, beaver, rabbits, turkey, pheasants, heath-birds, pigeons and partredge innumerably; we need no setting dogs to ketch, they run by droves into the house in cold weather,” wrote William Penn, founder of the state, upon his arrival in Pennsylvania on October 29, 1682. Penn was equally enthusiastic about the state’s rich wildlife resources in other letters, like the one he wrote to the Earl of Sutherland on July 28, 1683. “I have had better venison, bigger, more tender and as fatt as in England,” he wrote.

Settlers were quick to take advantage of that bounty, by whatever means necessary. Deer were taken in such quantity that the state enacted its first hunting regulations on August 26, 1771. That’s when Provincial Governor Sir William Keith outlined a law that protected “buck, doe, fawn, or any other sort of deer whatsoever” from January 1 to July 1. Violators paid a fine of twenty shillings, though Indians were exempt.

This restriction did little, though, to slow the market hunters who could make money by selling venison to the residents of America’s growing cities. They continued to kill deer by any means possible, including many that are now illegal. They shot deer over salt licks. They chased them with dogs. They even perfected the art of jacklighting, or shooting deer at night, often from a boat, with the aid of a pitch-pine torch. The light from the torch transfixed the deer momentarily, giving the shooter time to score a killing hit.

Hunters of the era, who wrote of taking as many as a hundred deer each fall, decimated the herd. Things got so bad that Potter County residents circulated a petition seeking “passage of a law to prevent all persons, except actual residents or the holders of lands, houses or tenements, in the county of Potter, from killing or destroying any deer therein, at any period of the year whatsoever.” That request failed to become law, and the devastation continued unchecked. Other laws were adopted later, but to no effect. In 1869 the state legislature limited deer season to September 1 to December 31; in 1876 it was shortened again, from October 1 to December 31. In 1895 it was scaled back one more time, from October 15 to December 15.

All of this was too little too late. Constant hunting pressure, combined with widespread clear-cut logging that, in the practice of the day, left entire mountainsides without a single tree standing, had destroyed the deer population. With 70 percent of what had been “Penn’s Woods” converted to agricultural fields by the 1890s, there were few deer and little food or cover for those that remained.

John M. Phillips, a prominent businessman who went on to become one of the state’s leading conservationists, summed up the situation in a story he told at the fourteenth American game conference in New York City. He and a friend were hunting in what is now the Allegheny National Forest region, between Ridgway and Brockway. They jumped a buck in the morning.

“About six inches of snow had fallen, so we tracked it all day, camped on the trail that night, followed it the next day, then rested overnight at the town of Brockwayville. In the morning we took up the trail again and succeeded in jumping and killing the buck,” Phillips said. “During all that long chase we didn’t cross another deer track. I said to my friend, ‘I am done—I think I have killed the last deer in Pennsylvania.’”

He hadn’t, but he probably wasn’t far off the mark. The harvest in 1906 was estimated at only eight hundred deer, 350 of which were bucks. The following year, when Pennsylvania had its first-ever bucks-only season, the kill dropped even lower, to two hundred bucks and thirty illegal does.

Things began to change only when sportsmen began to lobby aggressively for changes in deer management. First, in 1895, hunters led the way in creating the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the state’s first agency mandated with protecting wildlife. In 1913, with the help of a letter from former president and conservationist Theodore Roosevelt, sportsmen prompted the inauguration of a $1 hunting license to fund the Commission.

In the years between those two events, the Commission, again with the backing of hunters, established refuges known as game preserves. The first was formed in Clinton County in 1905, and several others followed. They had several things in common. They averaged about thirty-two hundred acres. All hunting was prohibited. And they were located on state ground in the hope that game populations would take root there, then spread onto other property.

To speed things up, the Game Commission stocked white-tailed deer on those preserves beginning in 1906. The first shipment of fifty deer was purchased from a wildlife propagator in Michigan. Over the next nineteen years twelve hundred more deer were purchased from commercial deer farms in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio, and were stocked throughout Pennsylvania.

A friend and fellow deer hunter, Jeff Nelson, provided me with a fascinating firsthand account of how those refuges and stocking efforts worked. Over lunch one day, he showed me some documents belonging to his grandfather, Emil L. Nelson, who was a game warden for the Game Commission in the early 1920s. One of the mementos Emil passed down to his grandson was a blueprint-like map of game preserve 29, located in his district in Warren County. Dated April 18, 1922, and signed by chief of lands W. Gord Conklin, the map shows a parcel bounded by Warren Boro to the north, the Allegheny River to the west, Minister Creek to the south, and Clarendon Boro to the east.

There’s no way to tell what the many lines and numbers on the map mean. The map does, however, provide a wonderful reference when you’re looking through some of Emil’s old notes. Jeff gave me two shirt-pocket-sized notebooks that Emil carried when he was on duty. Bound in leather and still in excellent shape, they smell slightly musty, like old library books that haven’t been cracked open in quite a while. They’re veritable treasure chests of information, though.

Emil, using his own form of shorthand, penciled inside each notebook a record of his activities on a daily basis. His notes speak of a hardworking man from a long-ago era. In 1923 he wrote, “working about buildings,” “had horse shod,” “working on telephone lines,” “fighting fire along east line,” and “with two men planted 2,350 seedlings.” He recorded how many miles he traveled each day and how he did it—for example, “12 car, 6 foot, 6 trolley.” There are details about his expenses, too: eighteen cents for the trolley, ten cents for the phone, and $1 for stamps.

There are camp names and rosters, arrests—“Arrested Arthur Woodland. $25 fine paid. Rained all day”—and all sorts of scribbles, figures, and odds and ends. What’s most interesting, though, are the notes Emil Nelson kept about releasing deer into game preserve 29. The notebooks cover various months between December 1921 and March 1923. There are many, many references to Emil’s trips to Clarendon—perhaps there was a train station there?—to pick up deer and return empty crates that might be used to bring more whitetails in. He also recorded details about what happened to the deer after they were released.

A sampling of his notes looks like this:

• Dec. 19, 1921: Unload deer. 4 bucks, 2 does
  
• Dec. 20, 1921: Paid express on deer $80
  
• Dec. 29, 1921: To Clarendon and return for deer. 4 fawns, 2-point buck
  
• Jan. 5, 1922: 4 does. One died 1/6/22
  
• Jan. 6, 1922: Clarendon and return for deer. 11-point buck and buck fawn
  
• Jan. 9, 1922: Paid express on two does. Crates $16.35. Deer $27.80. Dinner 40 cents. Telegram 53 cents.
  
• Jan. 15, 1922: Brought out alfalfa for deer
  
• Jan. 31, 1922: Found doe one mile from Clarendon
  
• Feb. 12, 1922: Found one doe, hind quarter part eaten
  
• Feb. 23, 1922: Found fawn, no marks
  
• March 13, 1922: Found 10 point buck
  
• March 11, 1923: Clarendon SGL, two trips looking for shipment of deer
  
• March 12, 1923: Brought out three bucks, two does