Not your father’s opening of deer season: Full weekend of buck and doe statewide starts Saturday

For the first time, the Pennsylvania Game Commission will offer buck and doe hunting concurrently statewide for two weeks starting Saturday.

It’s not even called the opening of buck season anymore, but the opening of firearms deer season.

The regular firearms deer season begins Saturday and includes Sunday , one of three Sundays open to hunting this year, and ends Dec. 11.

The name change reflects the commission’s recent strategic moves to offer more opportunities for hunters to get out and spread them across the landscape over a longer time.

“People have a lot more time to choose when they hunt, basically,” said Seth Mesoras, a spokesman for the game commission’s Southwest office. “Hunters work. Many have kids. And they only have so much time to hunt.”

Also, some don’t want to be in the field during inclement weather.

The longer hunting season slows down the flood of people in the field on opening day and counters the poor weather not conducive to hunting, Mesoras said. “Weather will have less of an impact on bringing out hunters during a longer season.”

Loving weekend-long hunting

Recently, the game commission has provided more hunting opportunities, such as extending archery seasons and breaking the centuries-old ban on hunting on Sundays last year.

“Like many people, Saturday and Sunday are the only days I can hunt,” said Chuck Bartus, 34, of Harmar. “The Sunday hunting restrictions effectively cut the opportunities I had to do so in half.”

The extended archery season also helped Bartus, who bagged a buck with his bow in October near his home.

The concurrent buck and doe season this year will give Bartus more time to hunt.

He would like to see more Sundays open to hunting and generally more hunting opportunities. “I remain optimistic for continued progress and will be grateful for any additional time I can spend in nature doing what I love,” Bartus said.

Mark Boerio, owner of the Army Navy store in Latrobe, will be headed out to the woods early Saturday, hunting on an Indiana County farm. Depending on how he does, he might hunt Sunday on property in nearby Unity.

The addition of Sunday gives Boerio a whole weekend of hunting.

“Last year, there were a lot of hunters complaining about the Saturday start … they were traditionalists. They were used to heading to camp a few days early before hunting began and enjoyed that time,” Boerio said. “This year, I’ve not heard as many complaints about it.”

After a five-year hiatus from deer hunting in Western Pennsylvania while living in Arizona, Doug Nicolai admitted he is excited about Saturday’s opening of firearms deer season in Pennsylvania and getting back into Penn’s Woods with friends.

“I’ve missed the camaraderie with friends and family to tell you the truth,” said Nicolai, 70, of Bethel Park, a former Greensburg-area resident. “We used to leave the Friday after Thanksgiving and be at camp in Somerset County for an entire week. It was a lot of fun.”

Although he was pleased with some of the game commission’s hunting season changes, he doesn’t like mixing buck and doe hunting on the same day. And he doesn’t think doe should be hunted.

Nicolai and a friend from Donegal will head to Blairsville, where he hopes to harvest a buck.

Many doe tags sold out locally

The commission determines how many doe tags it will release to the public given how much or little they want to cull the deer herd.

The agency considers factors such as deer-human conflicts and the impact of deer browsing on forest health, Mesoras said. “We want to see populations go down in populated areas like Allegheny County.”

The total number of antlerless licenses this season has been reduced slightly from 932,000 to 925,000. The commission’s board said its decision to allow antlerless deer taking throughout the hunting season is not intended to increase the antlerless harvest. Deer populations are managed through the number of antlerless licenses.

One antlerless deer is harvested for every four licenses issued on average, according to the commission.

Regionally, many of the licenses are sold out.

Licenses for Wildlife Management Unit 2C covering Westmoreland and surrounding counties with 67,000 licenses and 2D covering primarily Armstrong County with 74,000 licenses are gone, Mesoras said.

For Allegheny County in 2B, about 9,700 were still available out of 29,000, he said.

Hunters harvested an estimated 435,180 deer in Pennsylvania during the 2020-21 seasons, according to the commission. That was 12% higher than the 2019-20 harvest of 389,431 and the highest harvest in 15 years, the agency said.

Antlered deer played a large part: Hunters took 174,780 buck last year, an increase from 163,240 in 2019-20 and 147,750 in 2018-19, and the most ever in the antler restrictions era, according to the commission.