DMAP permits available on state game lands this year
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HARRISBURG -- Pennsylvania's Deer Management Assistance Program is available on some state game lands for the first time in the 2023-24 hunting seasons.
Through DMAP, hunters can get permits that allow them to harvest antlerless deer -- one per tag -- on the specific property for which the permit was issued.
DMAP permits for the 2023-24 deer seasons go on sale at 8 a.m. Monday.
DMAP has been around for years, but previously was offered only on other public lands and private lands to help landowners achieve land use goals and/or to limit the spread of chronic wasting disease. But it's needed on some state game lands now as well, said Game Commission Forestry Division Chief Paul Weiss.
Forest management conducted on state game lands is intended to create the best variety of habitat for wildlife, a desirable distribution of tree age classes, including early successional forest. But, Weiss said, overbrowsing attributable to deer is limiting the success of those efforts.
"We cannot successfully re-establish new age classes and get them through to maturity if we cannot get the seedlings beyond deer browse height," Weiss said.
He pointed to State Game Lands 100 in Centre and Clearfield counties as an example of what's going on. It was hit hard by spongy moths between 2006 and 2009, so the Game Commission did salvage harvests, treated the area with herbicides twice and conducted prescribed fires on about 2,000 acres.
Together, that opened the canopy enough that a new forest should be growing.
"But if you stand up there and spin in a circle, as far as you can see, there's no vegetation taller than the height of the ferns," Weiss said.
Dig beneath the ferns and you can find knee-high red maples as big around as your thumb, he noted. But they can get no taller before deer browse them back. If that continues, that would-be forest - and others like it elsewhere - "have no future," he said.
That's bad not just for the trees, but for the deer and a wide range of other wildlife, ruffed grouse among them, that need young forest to thrive, he said.
The Game Commission has tried to overcome deer browsing using fencing, but that's expensive. Weiss noted that, over the past two years, deer fence installation costs increased by about 50%, to about $579 an acre.
Hunters can help control deer in those situations, Weiss said. But by excluding state game lands from DMAP previously, hunters often had greater incentive to hunt elsewhere.
Weiss pointed out that Pennsylvania's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), which manages state parks and forests, and Allegheny National Forest both use DMAP. They are two of the state's three largest public landowners, with the Game Commission being the other.
The state's two largest private landowners, Collins Pine and Lyme Timber Co., use DMAP, as well.
All have property either adjacent to or surrounding state game lands.
State Game Lands 34 in Clearfield and Elk counties, for example, is completely surrounded by DCNR lands enrolled in DMAP. State Game Lands 29 in Warren County is completely surround by Allegheny National Forest, while State Game Lands 24 in Forest and Clarion counties is bounded by Allegheny National Forest on one side and Collins Pine land on the other.
"This means in areas where we have significant overbrowsing problems, oftentimes hunters are incentivized to hunt on lands surrounding game lands because of the additional tags and opportunities," Weiss said.