The Pennsylvania Game Commission released the 2019-2019 deer harvest report this week.

Pennsylvania hunters posted their highest overall deer harvest in 14 years when they took 374,690 deer during all of the Pennsylvania hunting seasons, which closed in January. These are the greatest numbers since the 2004-05 season and it topped the 2017-18 numbers by 10 percent.

When these reports come out, there is a great deal of debate among hunters about the numbers. One issue is that Pennsylvania does not have deer check stations and the PGC counts on hunters following through with reporting their harvest from post card, e-mail or by phone.

Does every hunter participate with the required reporting ... doubtful? The PGC accounts for these failed reports by hunters with statistical averaging by field officer reports.

After four years of successive annual increases in buck harvests, hunters posted a buck harvest of 147,750, which placed fourth overall since the start of antler restrictions in 2002. The largest harvest in the antler restriction era – 165,416 – occurred in the first year.

Hunter participation has been way down, especially when you have rainy season openers. This is bad for hunter participation when about half of all bucks harvested occurs on the season’s opening day, when hunter participation is usually at its highest. There is a significant correlation between hunter participation and the harvest numbers.

Steady rain in most of the state persisted through the morning, making things difficult. The buck harvest never recovered from the poor opener and low harvest rate.

Still, hunters took plenty of antlerless deer, with a harvest of 226,940, which is about 10 percent larger than the previous year’s total of 203,409. I know that there were quite a few antlerless deer in the areas that I was hunting and most hunters who wanted an antlerless deer had plenty of opportunity to do so.

The WMU’s that we hunt in Butler County are 1A and 2D and both were down in their buck numbers — 500 less bucks were taken in 1A and around 3,000 less bucks were harvested in 2D.

The antlerless numbers fared much better with 2D increasing the harvest by 3,500 deer with a total of 20,958. It will be interesting to see the numbers of tags appropriated for this season.

The Game Commission reported that the percentage of older bucks in the 2018-19 deer harvest remained amazingly high. About 64 percent of the bucks taken by hunters were at least 2½ years old. The remainder were 1½ years old.

“That almost two-thirds of the bucks taken last year in Pennsylvania were at least 2½ years old is a tribute to the science our deer managers use and the sacrifices a generation of hunters made in the Commonwealth,” said Game Commission Executive Director Bryan Burhans. “The bucks being taken every day in Pennsylvania’s deer seasons are living proof that this Commonwealth has never managed whitetails better.”

Bowhunters accounted for about a third of Pennsylvania’s overall deer harvest, taking 110,719 deer (54,350 bucks and 56,369 antlerless deer). The buck harvest was down by 13 percent from the previous license year due to unseasonably warm weather and rainy days in 2018. The muzzleloaders stayed about the same in 2018-19 with a harvest of 23,909 deer.

The PGC is currently working to develop its 2019 antlerless deer license recommendations, which will be considered at the April 9 meeting of the Board of Game Commissioners. In addition to harvest data, staff will be looking at deer health measures, forest regeneration and deer-human conflicts for each WMU as it assembles antlerless allocations.

The general discussion around with hunters is that there will be little change with the allocations other than some tightening up around problems areas or under harvested WMU’s.

No matter what the PGC decides, you can’t do much when the weather isn’t cooperating with the hunters. Until we meet again, keep your ears open for the decisions made at the April 9 meeting of the PGC in Harrisburg!

Jay Hewitt is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle