Posts Tagged → DMAP
Sunday hunting in January, 2026?
Last summer, Pennsylvania was approved for as much Sunday hunting as the PA Game Commission would care to implement. After decades of wrangling, a simple law allowing the agency to set all hunting days was passed, and in fact, PA hunters got a whole bunch of Sundays to hunt on. It was glorious.
Nothing was simple about getting the simple law passed. It required the departure from the PA Farm Bureau board a whole host of people who for decades had publicly said “Sunday is for church, and if you don’t go to church on Sunday, you should go, even if your religion has you going on Friday or Saturday or not at all.”
They were that un-American, these supposedly all-American arbiters of all things religion on the Farm Bureau board. For decades the PA Farm Bureau had held up Sunday hunting in PA, even as Sunday hunting freedom was implemented across the USA. Out West, Sunday hunting was never in question. A citizen’s right to choose when to hunt was respected. But back East, the home territory of the Puritans and the Quakers…nope, Blue Laws all week long, for hundreds of years.
So now that we have Sunday hunting freedom on the books here, what will PGC do with it? We saw this past season greatly improved with something like ten or eleven additional days to be afield (legitimately). But now, as we enter into a very complicated extended rifle season for antlerless deer, mostly starting December 26th and ending January 24th, it appears that we don’t have any Sundays to hunt in January, 2026.
Tell me this is not the strangest thing…
This could well be an easy oversight by the PGC staff, who were probably giddy and overwhelmed with logistical considerations last summer, as they worked on implementing PA’s first-ever real Sunday hunting. Or it could have been a carefully considered gentle tap on the brake pedal, a desire to measure success or failure first, before going full bore ahead in Fall 2026.
It is easy to understand how policy officials can think that way. But now here we are. And now that we all saw how easy it was to implement Sunday hunting this past Fall, I have a request of the PGC staff: Quit being all responsible and anxious about Sunday hunting! Go full bore, baby!
See, PGC was not all anxious about another very complicated policy it is now implementing for the first time ever, this year into next: Extended rifle season for antlerless deer.
The purpose of extending rifle season for antlerless deer state-wide on some properties, and region-wide on others, is to allow the alpha hunters among us more time to help bring down the deer population. So that the kindly drivers on our highways and byways do not hit overpopulated deer with their cars.
Which begs the question: Why have an extended deer season if we don’t also have Sunday hunting during it?
For those readers who are hearing this extended deer season business for the first time, or even for the second or third time, yes, it is real and it is really complicated.
First, ALL DMAP properties state-wide are open to antlerless deer hunting with a rifle, from December 26th to January 24th, 2026. All private and public DMAP properties, including private properties that are not yet a designated DMAP property but which fall within one of the Chronic Wasting Disease DMAP areas. You do need to have a DMAP tag to hunt with a rifle in or on one of these DMAP areas.
I think CWD DMAP area #6396 here in southcentral PA still has DMAP tags available.
Second, extended rifle season in some WMUs, like 4C, runs January 2nd to January 19th.
This is all in addition to the regular flintlock and archery season that begins December 26th and runs through January 24th. If you want to hunt buck, you can only have a flintlock or archery tackle with you; no rifle.
So clearly the PGC thinks PA has too many deer, and the agency wants us hunters to remove more does from the landscape, so they are giving us more time afield with the most effective hunting tool, the rifle. It then logically follows that the agency should want us hunters to have more time afield in pursuit of implementing their policy, too.
If you want Sunday hunting this coming January, which I do, then contact the PGC and let them know.
And while we are discussing hunting here, may we suggest that all archery and flintlock hunters wear an orange hat? Why not? With all the rifle hunters out with us in the late season, our camo-only ways are likely not as safe as they were when it was just us flintlock and archery hunters afield.
Happy hunting!
We want Sunday hunting in January!
Review of Kirschner’s deer lures
The whitetail deer rut is now under way across the Americas, and although writing about politics (especially a handful of days before such a momentous Election Day) is the bread and butter of this blog, man does not live on bread alone. Occasionally there must be a beverage. And Kirschner’s deer pee lure is it.
Twenty years ago I first met Bob Kirschner at the Pennsylvania Outdoor Show at the Pennsylvania Farm Show complex, in the traditional archery section. Among a slew of often cantankerous iconoclasts (think about the kind of people who hold onto traditional archery against the tide of ultra high-tech training wheel bows), he was a funny guy. As in kind of odd, as in not a huckster or a salesman, but almost shy.
Even though he was surrounded by a big display of his wares, which included his own videos on how to bowhunt wary deer using his unique deer pee lures, Bob was not a hard selling, fast talking circus barker. Instead, he seemed almost embarrassed that he had to take your money at all. Such is the way of the pure hearted, because of all the deer pee lures out there, Kirschner’s is among the very few that are worth anything. And that is because his pee is pure. No jest.
Somewhere at camp I have one of his videos that shows him making his deer lures. In one scene he is wearing a work smock, a big toothy grin, and carrying a large tub of deer legs sticking out in all directions. Each of those legs has a tarsal gland on it, which deer use to communicate with each other through their highly refined sense of smell. Bob painstakingly cuts out each gland and grinds it up into a paste, which forms the base of his very smelly deer lures. This takes a lot of work and a lot of time.
Contrast Bob’s laborious hands-on process to the over-the-counter stuff sold by the gallon at the big box stores. Not to knock anyone in particular, but my experience with many different brands is they are at best watered down versions of Kirschner’s lures, and at worst they are synthetics that don’t last very long and that lose their smell within a few months of purchase. Like Code Red and Code Blue….golly, guys, what do you put in your bottles? I do not think it is 100% estrus deer pee.
Somewhere a few years ago I saw an article about how much doe pee lure was sold nationwide, which is a LOT, like hundreds of thousands or millions of gallons, compared to how many penned farm doe deer there are, which is very few, and how a basic back-of-the-envelope calculation showed that the vast majority of “doe pee” lure sold in the USA is not actual doe pee. At least not 100%. Because the standards are so lax or even non-existent, what is sold as doe pee lure might only have 1% estrus doe pee in it.
There just are not enough penned farm deer to produce the vast amount of “deer pee” sold to hunters. Not even close. Which means that a lot of what is being sold as deer pee lure is not.
And this sorry situation is NOT what Kirschner sells. He sells stuff that will curl your hair if you sniff it, because it is that nasty tarsal gland paste he made mixed with actual pee from his own pet deer. No, you don’t want to ask how he gets the deer urine….same story with foxes, coyotes, and bobcats, all of which are kept in farms where their excrement is collected and made into lures for trappers and hunters. It is all expensive stuff, and it all works very well.
From the time I bought a small squeeze bottle of Kirschner’s SilverTop at that year 2000 outdoor show (what is now the Great American Outdoor Show, which will not be held in 2021), until four years ago, when it ran out, I killed a PILE of deer coming in to his lure. When I say a pile, I mean a literal pile, like piles of deer stacked like cord wood in the back of my pickup trucks. How, you ask? Answer: I get as many DMAP and doe tags as possible, which might number ten each season, and then usually fill 75-100% of them from archery season through the late muzzleloader season and late shotgun-only season in southeast PA.
Then I ran out of the Silver Top, which only required a few drops on a tampon hung on a tree branch each time hunting, and so it had lasted so very very long. And I thought, “Why not try some other brands, see what they can do, how they work.”
And what I found was that not one other deer lure has worked anything like Kirschner’s in the southcentral and northcentral regions in which I mostly hunt. Not even close.
Bob Kirschner tells me that very few people make deer lure like he does any longer, and at age 74 he is about to hang up his spurs from his incredibly physical work. He says that some Amish farms are beginning to make deer lure the way he does, and that they will have to take up the slack when he shuts down his operation (hint hint young people out there, here is a chance to run your own business and have fun).
So I bought an 8-ounce bottle of Kirschner’s SilverTop the other day, and I am hoping this will last me a good twenty years. How can this one bottle last so long? Because only a few drops are needed each time out.
Here is another hint to hunters: Don’t overuse deer pee lure. It does not need to be sloshed about by the bucketful, and it should only be used during the actual rut, which is end of October into mid-November.
When hunters mis-use deer pee lure, either by using too much or by using it in early October, they are desensitizing deer to their world of smell, and instead of luring in deer, they confuse them and make them cagey and wary.
Using too much deer pee or using it at the wrong time eventually trains deer to stay away from it, or to be skeptical of it.
Two years ago I watched a Maryland hunting guide set off an enormous bottle of “Buck Bomb” for a youth hunter, which filled our woods with a chokingly sick scent that vaguely smelled like doe estrus. One buck was eventually brought in, a nice eight point, but he was so suspicious that he literally ran up to within 75 yards, looked around, and seeing no doe, turned and ran like hell back to where he had come from. Using too much of a good thing is not always a good thing to do, and hunters will do better in the short term and the long term if they are much more judicious in their application of deer pee lure.
So, there, that is my endorsement of Kirschner’s deer pee. I get no royalties, kickbacks, baksheesh, or remuneration from this essay. In fact, I hope Bob does not read it because he will probably object to being called shy. I write this out of simple admiration for a well done product that has made me a very happy hunter for a very long time, and I hope you get some, too. Just use it correctly.
Good luck this season. Have fun and be safe!
