STATE COLLEGE - Pennsylvania hunters took fewer than 465,000 deer during the 2003-04 deer season, the lowest take in four years, but a Penn State wildlife specialist says the deer are there - if hunters are willing to go deeper into the forest.

The season's harvest was 464,840, the Pennsylvania Game Commission said Thursday. That's the fourth-highest harvest on record but the lowest since the 1999-2000 season.

Duane Diefenbach, adjunct assistant professor of wildlife at Penn State University, suggested that one reason for the lower take - and for rising complaints about overhunting - is that large tracts of forests are almost untouched by hunters.

Surveying hunters through a 180-square-mile tract of Sproul State Forest in Clinton County, Diefenbach and other Penn State researchers found most hunters stuck close to roads, leaving vast sections of the forest unhunted.

"The greatest distance that an average hunter got from a road was half a mile, and 70 percent of hunters were found within a third of a mile of a road," Diefenbach said. "So there are these big areas that there aren't that many people.

"And what's interesting is, we did some surveys and asked people how crowded they felt, and some people reported they felt crowded. Overall, that was not the case, but there were some people who felt that way."

Although the study was done in just a part of the Sproul, Diefenbach said similar results could be expected from other "big woods" areas, particularly in north-central Pennsylvania.

Both the Game Commission, which operates state game lands, and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which operates state parks and forests, routinely open administrative roads during deer season to give hunters better access to the inner reaches of the forests.

But many forest roads remain closed during the season, making it harder for hunters to reach certain areas.

"Some roads can take the traffic when they're frozen and when it's hard-packed, when we've got a good permafrost, but they can't take the traffic when we had a deer season like we did five or six years ago, with warm wet weather," Brady said.

"First you get the tracks, then you get the erosion, then you get the sinkholes and the mud," he added. "And so the foresters make the calls on when the roads are safe to be open and when the resource won't suffer, the resource being the forest floor."

Soon after deer season ended in January, analysts were predicting a drop in the harvest. The main factor, they said, was a major snowstorm that blanketed the state on the season's opening weekend, typically the busiest for hunters.

Westmoreland County had the highest single-county harvest, with hunters taking more than 14,600 deer, followed by Bradford County. Harvests topped 13,000 in Berks, Clearfield, Crawford and Washington counties. Philadelphia County had the lowest take, just 80 deer.

"Given the challenges hunters faced - from poor weather to spotty food sources - they were able to fill their tags and move the overall deer program toward its goal of balancing the deer herd with its habitat and saving more bucks," said Gary Alt, supervisor of the commission's Deer Management Section.

In one bit of good news for hunters, Alt appears to be right about the bucks.

Preliminary estimates from an ongoing buck study by the Game Commission and Penn State show an increase in adult buck populations since new antler restrictions were implemented before the 2002-03 season.

Diefenbach said the year before the rule change, just 5 percent of bucks were adults. After just one year of the new rules, that number rose to 12.5 percent. Now one third of bucks are adults.

"Our buck study has shown that the antler restrictions are working," Diefenbach said. "We're finding a lot more adult bucks out there."