Posts Tagged → hunters
PA gets full Sunday hunting!
Got a photo taken by someone standing front and center at the bill signing ceremony less than an hour ago, of Governor Josh Shapiro signing the Sunday Hunting legislation by PA Sen. Dan Laughlin and PA Rep. Mandy Steele into law. As of 45 minutes ago, Pennsylvania joins some forty-plus-other states with full Sunday hunting, which means full freedom and no artificial restrictions on Pennsylvania hunters.
For anyone and everyone who hunts, adding Sunday to the days available is an enormous opportunity. It is either 50% of the weekend, when most working people get to hunt, or it is 1/7th of the week, a substantial percentage of the total time allotted to us.
Yes, there were arguments against Sunday hunting, and none of them were persuasive. Most of them were flat out ridiculous, like suddenly the risk of “being shot” went through the roof, but only on Sundays. Even on posted private land! Many of the arguments were made in bad faith, by conservative religious people who nonetheless desired to aggressively control and deprive basic American freedom to law abiding hunters and families doing the most wholesome family stuff together. You know you can walk and chew gum simultaneously, and you can also pray on Sunday morning and then go hunt with a clear conscience… just like millions of American hunters do in almost all fifty states.
This was never a difficult policy question, it was a question of political power.
For the past 25 years that I have been involved in this, originally as the strongest plaintiff in a state lawsuit (which after argument was then kicked over to federal court like a political hot potato), the amount of political and social bullcrap we had to wade through was unbelievable.
Every nonsense complaint and argument was made against Sunday hunting, even though the states where it was already allowed had none of those problems as a result of it. No opponent ever conceded that private property should be unregulated in this regard. Heck, we could and often did target shoot all Sunday long on private property, and ride ATVs, which was perfectly fine, but one little .22 aimed at a squirrel was apparently Armageddon, the end of the world, oh, the humanity.
So here we are, with the PA Game Commission working right now to implement this freedom. I do not think it is likely that we will automatically see a bunch of Sundays open up in deer season this Fall, but I could be wrong. I hope I am wrong. More likely, we will see some small game and late deer season Sundays open up in January-February 2026, which will be most welcome. I imagine that by this time next year, we will get our printed hunting and trapping guide with probably close to every Sunday open to hunting from September dove and squirrel seasons through late flintlock and special regulations areas hunts into the end of January.
This means maybe an additional 16 days afield, total (four days each in October, November, December and January), but for those hunters who cannot hunt on Saturday, the weekend is finally theirs as much as it is anyone else’s to be free on. That is simple and long overdue justice.
Thank you to HUSH, to Senator Dan Laughlin, Rep. Mandy Steele, and to all of those who were in the trenches for these past twenty five years, namely Kathy Gehman (founder of HUSH along with Brad Gehman), Harold Daub, Kevin Askew, Robb Miller, and various Sportsman’s Alliance leaders.
FREEDOM!
PGC executive director Steve Smith on the Governor’s left
PA Governor Josh Shapiro signs Sunday hunting into law today, just an hour ago. Photo Credit goes to “mister anonymous” thank you very much
Change Needed in Aisle One – Bob Casey needs to go
Several names are on repeat across the decades here in Pennsylvania politics – Scranton and Casey being the two modern dynasties. Both Scranton and Casey families have fielded repeat elected officials, some of whom have been impressive, and some of whom have simply ridden on the coat tails of their fathers and gotten very little done, except hold office and enjoy prestige and an easy paycheck.
Bob Casey, Jr. is of the latter clan, and he has now been a US senator for egads, I don’t know how long, a really long time. At least 18 years. Before that he held elected office at the state level. All because his dad, Bob Casey, Sr., was an impressive moderate governor, who understood and worked with all ends of the political spectrum.
This current Casey apple has fallen way far away from the Casey apple tree, as Bob Casey, Jr. has held hard to the extreme political Left and never looked back or right. Everything he originally ran on – somewhat pro Life, earnestly pro gun rights, pro free speech, pro religious rights, pro Pennsylvania jobs, pro Pennsylvania workers – forget it all, he ditched it all.
Bob Casey, Jr. is a full-on Washington DC Swamp Thing. He has abandoned us Pennsylvanians as he galavants around DC enjoying feeling important, year after year after year. I took some screenshots of his official US Senate website earlier this year, before the campaign season started up. See them below. They show that Bob Casey has done literally nothing, zero, for years. He did not even try to pretend that he was doing anything!
One of my greatest frustrations are voters who say “Well, my parents were Democrats and, by golly, I vote Democrat, too.”
Ummm hello, this Democrat Party today is not your grandfather’s Democrat Party. It is a totalitarian, cruel, vicious, lawless communist movement that must be stopped. It really has not changed much since the Democrat Party was defeated by the Union Army in 1865, but for a few decades it was home to amazing American leaders like John F. Kennedy.
Today, JFK would be a far-right Republican. That is how much the Democrat Party has moved to the Left.
So, the only way a do-nothing DC Swamp Thing like Bob Casey gets re-elected is when people vote because they recognize a name and think “Awww, I like that guy.”
No, you do don’t like Bob Casey. Not if you are paying any attention to him. He has done nothing for Pennsylvanians for decades. Casey has literally abandoned us Pennsylvanians, because he has relied on a mindless, robotic voting bloc to keep returning him to power, regardless of his incompetence and lack of loyalty to them.
Unfortunately, candidate Dave McCormick is the alternative to Casey. And I am no fan of McCormick, who I think is likely to try to become a DC Swamp Thing himself.
In the Republican primary for US Senate earlier this year, I supported Brandi Tomasetti, whose ballot signatures were ridiculously challenged by McCormick at the last minute, so she was forced to withdraw from the race. Anyone who has an inkling of this ballot petition process knows it is ripe for abuse in every direction, and McCormick took full advantage of his big money opportunity to knock his only competitor off the ballot. Brandi just did not have the money to withstand all of the legal challenges McCormick threw at her.
I really dislike people who game any system, and McCormick definitely gamed the PA primary election system. Yuck. If you believe in giving the voters a choice, and if you believe in yourself, then you are not afraid of a challenger with ten bucks in her campaign account. You debate her and beat her fair and square. McCormick did not do any of that.
Plus, I like my Pennsylvania politicians to actually live in Pennsylvania, which Casey used to (he has spent all his time in DC for many years), and which McCormick used to. On this count, both men are losers.
Whatever RINO DC Swamp garbage McCormick is inclined to engage in, he will stand up for our Second Amendment rights, of that I am certain. And that alone qualifies him for my vote and the vote of every other Pennsylvania gun owner and hunter. So tired of being sold out on this critical issue by liar Bob Casey!
So I am no huge fan of Dave McCormick. But on balance, he is the lesser of two evils. After decades of watching Casey do nothing for us, it is time for a change in Senate Aisle One and Bob Casey has got to go. Time for a new face, a new voice. McCormick got my vote, and I hope you will send a message to DC and vote for him as well.
And Dave McCormick, if you win this election, and spend the next six years ingratiating yourself deeply into the DC Swamp, and abandon us like Bob Casey has, then I will move Heaven and Earth to find a viable challenger in your first primary race.
Only in July of this year did Bob Casey post anything on his senate website. And he made no mention of the assassination attempt on Trump. Bob Casey is a huge zero.
PA Game Commission changing leadership
Kind of a wildlife management wild ride here in the Keystone State, though it is tough to tell if anyone really noticed or if anyone really cared. I care. People who care about animals should care.
In just a few weeks the Pennsylvania Game Commission has gone from from a very traditional conservation leadership style and background to a new style and background we have not seen in over a hundred years. I think this is a good thing, though I am sad about how it happened.
Recall that several months ago, attorney Steve Smith was promoted from director of the PGC’s Bureau of Information to deputy director of the agency, second in command to executive director Bryan Burhans. A good choice, as Smith is the very image of the dutiful, honest, earnest, hard working, straight shooting, unemotional, careful, procedurally diligent government employee. While PGC is a long way from the colorful Wild West frontier culture it once had, it still has a shadow of a bunker mentality and insular culture that do not serve the agency, its employees, or the public, and Steve is not representative of that.
Where Bryan Burhans had worked at the American Chestnut Foundation and other iconic conservation and wildlife management groups, with direct personal contacts in the nonprofit and foundation world, Steve Smith is an attorney who just happens to hunt, fish, and trap, and of course share the wildlife and habitat conservation ethos that animates hunters, trappers, and “fisherpeople” everywhere.
A devoted family man, Smith worked in private legal practice before joining PGC’s legal staff about 16 years ago. Where Burhans carried the mail for nonprofit advocacy groups both out of PGC and in it, which is the traditional model for wildlife management agency leaders across America, Smith has been long focused on public agency nuts and bolts. Dotting I’s and crossing T’s in the shadow of big speeches and public policy debates.
There is a gigantic world of difference between these two men, Bryan and Steve; their backgrounds, personalities, and outlooks could not be more different. Again, we are going from strength to strength with the change.
Bryan Burhans gets tons and tons of credit for gently, sometimes assertively molding the PGC into a more publicly accessible, publicly responsive public agency. Unlike most of his predecessors, Bryan was not a former Game Warden. And so from his own get-go seven years ago he was less insular, less committed to the law enforcement view of all things wildlife.
Yes, if you read some news reports about Bryan’s departure a couple weeks ago, you will then read about some state lawmakers griping that the agency is still not as accessible or responsive as the PA Fish & Boat Commission. I am sure that is true, and for good reasons. But compared to where the once insular and bunker-mentality PGC was, say, ten years ago, or especially twenty-five years ago, it is light years better now. Much improved. And, gasp if you must, the PGC actually now employs women in senior positions. This may be not big news to most people, but it is a fact that wildlife agencies are notoriously hide-bound and ultra traditional, the PGC having rung the bell in this regard for a long time. Celebrated wildlife biologists like Mary Jo Casalena may work for PGC, but it is as rare as hen turkey teeth that they also then get into senior management positions.
What is interesting about Steve Smith’s elevation to executive director upon Bryan’s departure is that we are actually seeing Pennsylvania wildlife management style return back to the days of Kolbfus and Pinchot – Americans without the supposedly key wildlife science “credentials” who simply care very much about wildlife, environmental quality, and habitat, and who have the intellectual capacity and personal management skills to implement the necessary policies.
PGC’s executive director is going from an outspoken advocate (albeit occasionally for things unrelated to wildlife management) to a quiet, humble, careful, almost reticent thinker. I am lamenting Bryan’s good-bye, because he did an outsanding job, and I am also really welcoming Steve’s hello. I believe that the many passionate watchers and stakeholders of PGC will be happy with Steve’s leadership there. Of course, those hunters who demand more deer than the landscape or society can sustain will never be satisfied, and I feel sorry for those people.
Update: Long and interesting interview with new ED Steve Smith is here.
Yeah, PA’s lame bear season in one picture
Pennsylvania is about to have one of its lowest bear harvests in decades. And like so many policies of any sort, the story of this failure is told not just by the data, but by a picture of the data (see below).
In sum, this year’s early bear seasons of archery and muzzleloader resulted in roughly 1200 bears being taken by hunters. These are predominantly individual hunters in elevated stands, not crews of drivers pushing bears to standers.
By the time the real firearms “bear season” arrives in late November, much of the steam has been bled out of the system, so to speak. The demand has been met. Many serious bear hunters have already taken their bear and they won’t be going “to camp” to participate in punishing bear drives through thick mountain laurel on steep mountains in the northcentral region. And when the most ardent hunters pull out of a camp, that loss of energy and excitement affects everyone else. We noticed many empty camps across the entire northern tier this past week.
Again, the 1,217 bears taken in the early season so far are 200 bears ahead of the roughly 1,000 bears on record for the “bear season” as of tonight, which is the end of the formal “bear season.” In other words, bear season wasn’t. It is actually producing behind the early season.
So is the early season the real bear season now?
Add a poor acorn crop to the situation, and whatever bears were roaming around in October’s early season have gone to den for the winter now in our “bear season,” or have moved southward by the time November arrives, because all of the available wild food has been eaten up. We are now in our third year of a failed acorn crop in the northern tier, and the silence of our woods shows it. No food means no wildlife. Hunters saw no poop, no deer rubs, no squirrels, no nothing. Hunters scouring rugged northern tier landscapes that are the historic high producers of bears are encountering woods devoid not just of bears, but of deer and turkey, as well.
Yesterday was a classic example of this dynamic. Our guys put on a drive across a NW Lycoming County mountaintop area that usually holds bears. I was the lone stander in the primo spot, a saddle between two hills with a stream running through. I could see far in every direction. There were no other drives happening anywhere around our guys, which is unusual. But another and much larger drive was going on behind me, and pushing toward the area we had hunted the day before. And half a mile down the forest road several long range hunters were set up looking across a canyon. If there were bears around, or even deer, the two drives would push them past the long range guys, at least.
And yet, by the time dusk arrived and our men had slid and tumbled down the mountain side to gather at the truck, no one anywhere had seen a bear or a deer, nor heard a shot. The long range guys were packing up as we were driving out, and they told us they had seen several deer on Sunday, but nothing else any other day, including that day that had so much activity.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission is a government agency, and agencies make mistakes. Sometimes the best-intended and carefully considered policies have unintended consequences. Maybe the Saturday opener (as opposed to the long-time Monday opener) to bear season is part of the failure we are seeing. Maybe it’s the acorn crop failure making a bad situation worse. Maybe it’s the early season stealing all of the thunder from the regular rifle bear season. I don’t know the entire answer why, but the numbers don’t lie, and this 2023 bear season was a flop. Yes, we will see another 100-200 bears taken in the extended season that is concurrent with deer season in some Wildlife Management Units. But overall, PA has not seen a bear harvest this low in a long time. And as I recall, last year wasn’t that great, either.
Something is wrong and something needs to change. A lot of small businesses in rural areas depend on these big bear and deer seasons to make their end-of-year financial goals. Let’s hope the PGC staff and the board are up to the task of fixing it.
Harvest results as of the last night of regular rifle bear season, 2023. Not final, but not going to change much. The early season was the best season.
Who is a “sportsman”?
Sportsmen were the nation’s first conservationists, advocating in the 1890s for sustainable harvests of previously unregulated birds, fish and animals like deer and bear. Acting against their own individual self-interests, they banded together to place limits on wildlife and habitat so that future generations would have opportunities to fish, hunt, camp, skinny dip, sight-see, wildlife watch, and help wildlife recover from 300 years of unregulated market hunting and industrial exploitation.
By the 1920s, a culture of stewardship and natural resource conservation was cemented into the sporting ranks by leaders like Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevelt, and Aldo Leopold. Hunting clubs across rural America incorporated stocking programs, tree planting, and facilitating public land purchases to improve and increase wildlife habitat.
Fast forward to today, where wildlife populations are largely stable, wildlife habitat is not in crisis mode, and hunters and anglers are experiencing the best opportunities to harvest trophy fish and game in many decades. We are living in a golden age of the outdoor lifestyle.
Riding on the successes of past generations, today there are some grumbling guys with guns, crabbing that they don’t have anything to hunt. The real shameful behavior is the recent abandonment by some of these men of the sportsman’s stewardship ethic and the conservation pledge that made the hunting community highly respected among the larger society. A group of disaffected users, takers, and malcontents calling themselves “sportsmen” recently endorsed HB 1576, a proposed Pennsylvania bill which would gut the very state agencies charged with protecting Pennsylvania’s natural resources, and remove from state protection those plants and animals necessary for healthy hunting habitat.
The question on the table is, Are these men sportsmen? Are they sportsmen like Aldo Leopold was a sportsman?
While I wait to hear back from others, my answer is No, these men are not sportsmen. They are simply men with guns, freeloaders, spoiled children living off the hard work of both past and present generations, while complaining it isn’t enough and they want more, now, dammit. Their behavior is short-sighted and embarrassing, nothing like the visionary selfless sacrifice of their forebears. They should be publicly shamed and drummed out of the ranks of sportsmen.
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“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
― Aldo Leopold
Pennsylvania Hunters: Army of The Republic
Pennsylvania Hunters: Freedom’s Bulwark
By Josh First
Like it or not, the Obama administration’s failed gun-running scheme, “Fast and Furious,” is viewed by tens of millions of Americans as the tip of the administration’s ice berg aimed at sinking the American tradition of gun ownership.
You’d only be kidding yourself if you stated that the Obama administration supports Second Amendment rights. This administration has done everything it can to hamstring legal gun ownership. Growing up in Central Pennsylvania, where Democrats strenuously, overwhelmingly, even defiantly promoted Second Amendment rights, it saddens me to see the party having lost so much ground on this issue. To tens of millions of Americans, with many regional exceptions across rural Pennsylvania, that political party increasingly represents a direct threat to the greatest Constitutional right we have, the one right that guarantees all the others.
Last week marked the beginning of another two-week Pennsylvania deer hunting season, using firearms, and about 750,000 licensed hunters are afield here during this time, down from a high of over one million twenty years ago.
Every year I am one of these licensed hunters, toting around a Remington 700 BDL in .30-06 in our steep, majestic mountains. It is extremely accurate out to hundreds of yards and it has taken countless deer, and one bear, when called upon at a second’s notice. Its open sights are designed to acquire the target quickly.
Having my rifle across my shoulder, cradled in my arms, slung over my back, clutched in my hand, or at my shoulder, ready to fire, is one of the most natural and comforting feelings I know. Along with my beautiful custom hunting knife made by John Johnson (JRJ knives, in Perry County) and bullet wallet on my belt, and a pack on my back containing food, water, drag rope, and survival essentials, I feel as ready to hunt as Oetzi the Snow Man of the Alps felt the day he died while hunting over 5,000 years ago. As we modern humans are essentially dolled-up Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in fancy clothes, it is as natural a feeling as a human can have. It is who we are at our core, like it or not.
Like many guys out there now, I enjoy hunting alone, stealthily reconnoitering remote cliffs and washes, or with one or two other friends stalking independently of one another, knowing that any of one us could connect with our quarry, or bump them to a buddy. About a zillion years of programming goes into this heightened sense of anticipation and satisfaction when it happens. Until a hundred and fifty years ago, failing to kill a deer meant the family went to sleep hungry, so there should be no surprise that successful hunting evokes the strongest feelings of pride, and happiness. Eating and living to see another day is pretty much the happiest thing a person can do. Today, we just take it for granted, and contract out the inconvenient killing to a hitman, more or less.
However, most of my deer and bear hunting is spent in the company of many friends, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Disaffected. As we move around and across the landscape, carefully coordinating with one another in long lines designed to drive game forward and to stay out of one another’s shooting lanes, I am re-amazed every year at the proficiency with which our guys move across that rough terrain, at the way they safely handle their high powered rifles, at the way that they snap that rifle to their shoulder and kill a far-off deer in only a second or two, before the window of opportunity closes. These folks are shooters, serious, excellent woodsmen. Focused. Formidable. Impressive. I’m proud to be among such company.
These are real men out there, and real women, challenging themselves to succeed in ways that most modern humans have no idea about, sadly. However, there is another group out there that can somewhat relate to how we live during this period, and that is the men and women in combat uniform.
If Pennsylvania hunters were an army, they would be the fifth largest in the world behind China, North Korea, India, Russia and the United States, the last of which has an army only fractionally made of actual shooters. Although I did not receive military training, and although most of my experience with firearms has been rooted in hunting and target shooting, my attitude about my right to own an assortment of firearms is pretty damned militant. And that same attitude is shared among the other 749,999 licensed hunters here, not to mention the other few million Pennsylvanians who stopped hunting years ago but who retain homes full of firearms and bullets. We are a bulwark of freedom, a silent army that need not say anything nor give word to what it represents. Its shadow is faint but long.
In that context, and in the shadow of “Fast and Furious,” one of the thoughts that repeatedly crossed my mind over the past few weeks in our beautiful mountains was, “Mr. Obama, if you want our guns, then come and take ‘em. Really, give it a try, pal.”
It ain’t happening. Our army is bigger than yours.