Syracuse.com - DEC responds to hunter complaints about 'deer management focus area'

[HuntingNY-News]

The area is located in Tompkins County. It's open during all the regular fall hunting seasons, along with one in January. Hunters complained recently about lack of access.

There's certainly a lot of deer in communities within the special, 60,000 acre zone, such as in this photo taken with the village of Cayuga Heights. Getting access to hunt them, though, is another issue. John Berry/The Post-Standard

A column I wrote earlier this month addressed complaints by hunters concerning the Tompkins County Deer Management Focus Area. The main issue was lack of access.

The area has an over-abundance of deer, according to state Department of Environmental Conservation. With that in mind, the DEC this fall designated a special zone where hunters, with a special free permit, could take two antler-less a day, every day if possible, for all the regular hunting seasons this fall -- in addition to a special season in January.

The area encompasses 60,000 acres of land in and around the city of Ithaca, NY and includes the city and town of Ithaca, the villages of Cayuga Heights and Lansing and parts of the towns of Danby, Caroline, Dryden, Lansing, Enfield, Newfield and Ulysses.

Before running the column, I submitted a written request to the local State Department of Environmental Conservation for a comment. No response was received by my deadline.

This morning, the DEC responded. I was emailed the following by the DEC's local press office, crediting Region 7 Wildlife Manager Steve Joule as the source:

"As previously indicated, the objective of the program is to reduce total deer populations within the DMFA by providing more time and more tags to hunters who can gain access to huntable land.

"The New York State Management Plan for White-tailed Deer was developed with extensive public involvement. Among the challenges identified by stakeholders and DEC biologist were:

"1) hunter access limitations, and 2) a need for greater flexibility in antlerless harvest in highly developed areas with overabundant deer populations.

"These two issues are not mutually exclusive; they are, in fact, often highly correlated with each other.

"A basic tenet of wildlife management is that, in populations that are managed primarily through recreational hunting, if access is not limited, annual hunter harvest may be expected to help “regulate” the population. As the resource becomes more abundant, so too does hunter participation, harvest rate, and overall harvest; the converse of this equation holds true as well.

"However, in such managed populations, if access is significantly limited, annual hunter harvest may be too low to prevent the population from continuing to grow above the carrying capacity. This is particularly so if hunter harvest is additionally restricted by the number of reproducing females that any one hunter can remove from the population each year (i.e. limiting doe tags).

"When deer become overabundant they can cause significant damage to agricultural crops and natural ecosystems, and when these overabundant populations are in close proximity to people, deer can cause property damage and health and safety concerns.

"In areas where traditional hunting methods and typical harvest management strategies are constrained, prohibited, or otherwise ineffective at managing local deer populations, the number of human-deer conflicts increases, as does the number of Deer Management Assistance Program (DMAP) permits Deer Damage Permits (DDP) issued. DMAP permits are issued to landowners for site specific deer management and are used during the open deer hunting seasons.

"However, the number of DMAP tags that can be filled by an individual hunter is restricted.

"Deer damage permits can only be issued outside of the regular hunting seasons and are used by landowners to help alleviate nuisance/damage situations by killing deer that were not harvested by hunters.

"Prior to implementation of the Tompkins DMFA, more than 500 DMAP tags were issued annually for property in Tompkins County, and 25% of DDPs issued throughout the nine counties comprising Region 7 were issued for property in Tompkins County.

"The DEC can only make deer management options like the DMFA available to municipalities, private landowners, and public land managers. However the agency does not have any control over whether or not a property owner/manager chooses to utilize the management option, nor does the agency have the authority to supersede any local ordinances that may restrict if/how the option may be used within boundaries of a given municipality/property.

"As was also previously indicated, the establishment of the DMFA does not change the legal requirement that hunters must still comply with all state trespassing laws, as well as all applicable local ordinances governing the discharge of firearms."

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog