Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Our goal is to use forestry to create as wide a range of quality forested habitat across the state.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Almost everything we do, the purpose of doing some habitat management action in forestry is we're trying to get some kind of vegetative response when we talk about.
[00:00:20] Speaker C: Hunting and shooting, like, we don't want to shoot every deer. So many people think the Game Commission, when they see the allocations, the numbers, they're like they want to kill them all. That's not what we want.
Our responsibility is to make manage that herd.
[00:00:31] Speaker D: Yeah, a lot of times you're thinking 100 years out, which is very difficult for people to think in that. Those terms. But as a forester, that's what you're looking. What do you want this stand to look like in 100 years?
[00:00:46] Speaker C: Hello, and welcome to Call the Outdoors, the Pennsylvania Game Commission's podcast. Today we have an incredible show for you. We've got some foresters from across the state, especially up there in the big woods, and we're going to talk about all kinds of things, about habitat and what happens here at the Game Commission. So thank you for tuning in to call the outdoors. Hey, if you haven't applied for your elk license yet, you have a few, you know, a week or so to do so. And just don't forget about that, because that drawing is coming up real quick here at the end of the month. So let's get into it. Let's talk about forestry and the stuff that happens here at the Pennsylvania Game Commission. We got a really cool episode today for Call the Outdoors, and it's hard to get this many people from north of I 80 here in Pennsylvania in one room. And, you know, all of our guests today are from the big woods, and we're going to be talking a whole lot about habitat, forestry, and a lot of the things that happen behind the scenes here at the Game Commission and some of the things that we take for granted. And we'd like to welcome our guests. And I'm going to let them start over there with Scott and introduce themselves, talk about, you know, what you do here at the Game Commission.
[00:01:44] Speaker D: So my name is Scott Wilbert. I'm from Clarion County.
I'm the regional forester in the Northwest region for the Game Commission.
I've been the regional forester for about six years now. Prior to that, I was a field Forester for 16 years. Prior to that, I worked in private industry for about three years.
[00:02:02] Speaker C: So you've been in the woods your whole life with. Dealing with trees? Yeah. We can't wait to get Some of this stuff. And you know, for me personally, when, when I came to the agency, when I walked through the woods, y' all have ruined me.
My first trip with a bunch of foresters, and they're down there under the leaves looking at stuff coming up like you don't realize everything that's happening out there. And that's what we're going to, you know, this won't be the last time we talk, but we're going to talk about a lot of that stuff today. And how about you, Dan?
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Yeah, my name is Dan Hegenstahler. I'm the regional forester in the North Central region, just east of where Scott is.
I've only been in this position for a few months, but I've been in the North Central region forestry staff for 12 or 13 years now. I'm originally from Indiana county in southwestern part of the state and live in Clinton county now.
[00:02:50] Speaker C: So let's talk about a little bit how you got to the agency, because it's a pretty good story.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: Well, I went to forestry school at Penn State. Like lots of folks in Pennsylvania that want to pursue forestry, I actually went for watershed management. I was really interested in. I was a big trout fisherman back then in high school. I still like to do that when I can. So I was kind of not sure between forestry and kind of the water watershed stuff. So I did that.
But I think I just had enough of school and really kind of by the end of college, I was ready to do something real different. I've always been interested in farming and agriculture also, so ended up after college working on a bunch of different farms, kind of traveling around the state, and was actually down in Perry county, where I think. I think you live.
[00:03:45] Speaker C: Yeah, Second God's country in.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: It was very nice down there.
And I ran into a fella who worked for the Game Commission at the time, was the neighbor, and he was sort of like, you know, I know you have a forestry degree. You've done some forestry work. Like, what are you doing? You know what, you want to get back into that? And it just. The timing was right for me to do that and ended up coming on as a. They had like, contracted foresters back then. I worked for university making habitat for a little. A little bird called a golden winged warbler. And I did that for a few years and kind of rescued me from what I was doing. And I still do some farming and like, that kind of thing too, but ended up at the North Central.
[00:04:34] Speaker C: You were kind of living off the land. I more or less wanted to talk about that shirt you had on for your job interview.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Well, so the thing was, I thought I had already got the job.
And I did, like, a phone call, which I thought was the interview. And then I showed up at the university where I was gonna be working for. And, you know, I just hadn't been around society a lot at this for a while.
And, you know, I had really long hair and, you know, probably a big beard. And I had this reindeer sweater. Cause it's probably the only sweater I had. You know, it was cold out, and I show up thinking it's kind of like the first day on the job. And here it was, actually a real interview with the professor there. And it went pretty. It went okay.
[00:05:24] Speaker C: I hear. I heard you got the job and you got a wife.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Yeah, my wife now, was there at the time, like, in the office.
She was a grad student. And I don't know what she thought, but here's this guy in a reindeer sweater showing up.
[00:05:40] Speaker C: That's a good tip for young foresters. If you're looking for a girlfriend, maybe.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: The reindeer sweater, just go for it.
And no. So, yeah, and I'm good friends with that professor, and awesome hunt with him all the time now. And. Yeah. So that's how I got here.
[00:05:58] Speaker C: Yeah, it's awesome when we're so lucky. A lot of people, when they look at the agency, they don't realize the skill set that's inside the agency from what you all do. I mean, all across the board. But, like, it's your passion. You live it every day.
I'm sure you don't want to be in this studio right now. You'd rather be out in the woods. Except for being 100 degrees out there.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty hot.
[00:06:16] Speaker D: It's nice to have an office job sometimes when it's this hot.
[00:06:19] Speaker C: I got you.
How about you, Paul?
[00:06:22] Speaker A: I'm Paul Weiss. I'm the chief forester here at the Game Commission. Originally, I'm from Forest county, so not too far away from where Scott lives now.
I've been the chief for a little over three years.
I've been with the Game Commission for about eight years now.
Prior to that, I worked in private industry and with dcnr, Bureau of Forestry.
[00:06:44] Speaker C: Awesome. Well, you know, when you talk about forestry, you know, it's a big word. But here at the. Here at our agency, it means a whole lot different than it does. And all of you talked about the industry, the forestry industry. What we do here at the agency is totally different. And Scott, if you just want to hit on, you know, what we do here at the Game Commission when it relates to forestry.
[00:07:03] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. So the coolest thing about our forestry program, it's unlike any other, is we do forestry for wildlife. And it's. It's the meshing of a lot of really cool things. So you're bringing biology in, you know, land management in and really getting to just do habitat management for critters. And that's what's really cool about it. You know, starting in the private industry, you know, I really enjoyed it. You were in the woods all the time, but, you know, you were doing things for a different reason, which is fine. But coming to the Game Commission, you know, it's. It's the best job in the world.
[00:07:37] Speaker C: Yeah. When you guys go out to the woods and look at something, there's a whole. You're not looking at trees necessarily, you're looking at making habitat. I mean, from what I can see. And how about you, Dan? You have anything to add on that one?
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think what makes it so fun and challenging is you still have to be a regular forester at the same time. I mean, because really, when we're trying to make a certain kind of habitat, we got to kind of use all those forestry kind of basic forestry skills that we learned in school and we had to learn on the job. And then we have to layer kind of the habitat thing on top of it.
And so it makes it challenging and lots of fun.
[00:08:15] Speaker C: And Paul, if you look at our forestry goals all entailed, if you had big. Just talk about it in like a singular sense, what is our goals here at the agency? When we look at forestry?
[00:08:28] Speaker A: Our goal is to use forestry to create as wide a range of quality forested habitat across the state as we can. So that can mean, in some cases we're trying to improve the condition of old forests so they have a better getting them towards that late successional, old growth type characteristics. A lot of other cases, lots of. A lot of our work is providing that young forest habitat that things like snowshoe hares and grouse need. But our goal is to provide a range of that mixed up all across the state as much as possible.
[00:08:59] Speaker C: Yeah, you know, and we have to manage.
We're tasked with managing 480 species. So, you know, so many times we talk about deer, grouse or turk, but like, we're trying to help everything out there. And I know I was on a project one time talking about golden wing, golden winged warblers that you took us on a tour on and how they were managing the forest for the habitat for those songbirds and how it benefited everything else that was in that area. And it was pretty tremendous. Just the game, the deer sign that we saw in those places that we looked. And that was a while ago, so I'm sure those areas are even doing better.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of species that you can kind of do multiple things. One thing you're doing is going to cover multiple species.
But there are species that need a real particular thing. And sometimes we do that. But like Paul said, creating that wide range of habitats, you're going to bring in everything from turkey brood rearing cover to golden wings and grouse and fishers and everything else.
[00:10:02] Speaker C: So when we talk about that, and I mean, we're just going to open this can of worms right now.
One of your biggest hurdles is deer when it comes to forestry. And, you know, I was in your country this spring, turkey hunting and just looking at, you know, when we don't have that herd in balance, how hard it is for you, y' all to do your job. Let's talk about that, you know, and the struggles that you face with, with deer. And especially today, as we look at 20, 25.
[00:10:27] Speaker D: Absolutely. So when, when we sit down and we come up with a plan for a particular game land that we're working on, you know, we're looking at all the different species that we're going to manage for. And let's, let's pick a grouse or, you know, an early successional species requires young forest. Well, that's where it gets complicated because you have to go in, you start to do different types of management, thinnings, different things like that, to open the canopy up a little bit to get some sunlight on the ground.
And you need to get regeneration. Well, when the deer herd's out of balance, you have a lot of deer and in specific areas they're eating all of that stuff. So then it complicates things because you can't go to the next step, you know, and we've tried lots of different techniques, we've tried to go larger on cuts, different things like that. But then ultimately sometimes you have to put deer fences up, you know, to keep the deer out.
[00:11:20] Speaker C: Well, when you make more food, it just attracts more deer. I mean, it's just, it's like a food plot. You plant an acre of clover or 10 acres of clover, you're just going to produce more stuff on the ground for them to eat. In a food plot sense, absolutely.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: I think the way I think about it is, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong here, but almost everything we do, the purpose of doing some habitat management action in forestry is we're trying to get some kind of vegetative response that's pretty much whatever. Whether it's something where we're trying to mimic old forest conditions or create super thick brushy young forest, either end of the spectrum, we're trying to do something and get a vegetative response. And if we can't get that vegetative response, no matter what kind of project we're doing, we're not going to be successful at meeting the objectives of that project. And like you said, Scott, with grouse, that's kind of the prime example. If you can't get that high stem density cover after a harvest or whatever kind of project we're doing, you're just not going to create that habitat.
[00:12:28] Speaker C: And you want diverse, you want diversity down there.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: That's right. And so of course you can. Depending on kind of what the level of deer pressure is, you might get something back, but only maybe the things that deer don't prefer to eat. And that often ends up being one or two species that maybe don't have that much wildlife value.
So we certainly try to work with.
[00:12:50] Speaker D: Completely change the dynamic of the forest. So if you're starting with an oak forest and you want to maintain it as an oak forest, but then all you're growing is birch or beech in the understory, you have some catastrophic event that takes the, the overstory oaks out, you've completely changed everything.
[00:13:05] Speaker C: Like when you say catastrophic, like what's a catastrophic?
[00:13:08] Speaker D: So like spongy moth or wind throw, something like that, you know, you get a large insect infestation in the Northwest, we get a lot of wind events.
So, you know, you end up losing a lot of your overstory trees, those good hard mass producing trees that a lot of our wildlife requires. You know, then, then you end up replacing it with birch or beech. That's just not as good a quality habitat.
[00:13:32] Speaker C: Right. So before we even go, we got a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of rabbit holes we can climb down right there. But I want to talk about habitat because it's a word that's used so much throughout life. And a lot here at the agency kind of want to get each of yours perspective or definition of habitat just as a whole. I mean, human beings, we have habitat too. And when you relate it to that, to me, it's a lot easier to understand. But if somebody Said what's habitat? What would you say, Paul?
[00:13:59] Speaker A: So I think it's pretty easy. You compare it to human beings. Habitat for wildlife is everything that they need to survive as far as food, cover, water. I mean, it basically boils down that.
[00:14:11] Speaker C: Simply it's their house.
[00:14:12] Speaker A: It's their. Their house. Like when you're walking through the woods, you're in their house, you're in their kitchen, you're in their. Their travel areas and habitat basically is just the bare minimum of everything that they need to. To survive as a species and to thrive. And it's our job as the. The Game Commission forestry program to provide as much of that habitat as possible across the range. It's got to be for all species. We don't manage for one species. We, like Dan talked about, we get into golden winged warbler sometimes and we get into snowshoe hare sometimes when you have species that are very specific. But a lot of our projects are just about a diversification of habitat types so we can cover all species.
[00:14:54] Speaker C: You know, when you look at our state game bird, you know, obviously there's lots of concern about the ruffed grouse, but you look at the areas, especially in your parts of the world, where you were specifically doing habitat projects for grouse, and you can actually go out and hear them drumming. And I mean, they're definitely. That's working. I mean, that's just when you can smile and, you know, I know we were on a turkey hunting a couple of years ago on a new piece that had a lot of early succession or herd grouse and lots of whippoorwills and, you know, kind of like it was when I was a kid, you know, and it was like, holy cow. Like, it does work when you think about big picture. But about you. Do you have anything to add to?
[00:15:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that's all. That's all right. I might even add that to kind of expand on that.
This analogy might get weird, but, like the house analogy, well, you wore a.
[00:15:37] Speaker C: Reindeer sweater to a job interview, so we wouldn't expect anything less.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: I mean, it's not just their house, it's the grocery store. It's like, I don't know, the school.
It's not just like for grouse, we really think about that high stem density kind of drumming cover as like grouse habitat, which it is. It's important. But a lot of species need a bunch of different habitat types for the different parts of their life cycle. So it's providing kind of all the things that they want close enough to each Other so that they can get to all the different things.
I think if everything was high stem density, kind of typical kind of mind's eye grouse drumming cover, it wouldn't be as good for grouse is if you had some mature forest patches in there, some really young stuff for broods to go do some bugging. So habitat is not only species dependent, but even kind of like life cycle dependent for each species. Then of course you got generalists like deer that I've changed a little bit how I think about some generalist species. We kind of think, oh, deer, even bears, they can use kind of all different habitats. Well, sure, but they're going to do much better.
[00:16:55] Speaker C: Well, they can adapt.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: You know, they can adapt, but they would much rather have, you know, in a forested landscape with young forest and mature forest and kind of everything in between so that there's soft mast like berries for, you know, bears to eat or, or browse in a, in a, in a regenerating clear cut. So having that diversity is just really super important even for generalist species.
[00:17:18] Speaker C: Let's, let's just recap on browse because it's important that we understand browse. And obviously deer, you know, they do it every day and you know, explain what browse is. I mean, there's probably some laying on this table.
[00:17:32] Speaker D: Yeah. So if you, you look at the terminal bud on a, on a, on a tree or a ceiling or a sapling, you know, basically what a deer will do is they'll just nip that bud right off. And if you think about it takes six to ten pounds of browse for a deer to eat that, that's a lot of buds that you're nipping off, you know, so that affects all that new growth. And when it keeps getting compounded year after year after year, you know, you'll see places where it just starts to go back down and down and down. You could have fabulous regeneration to start with. And then over a few years you start to get kind of like bonsai trees and, and then, and those seedlings can only take so much. After so much time, they will eventually die out, you know, and then you have to start all over again. But if they're eating everything, then it keeps trying to grow. That's where you really run into the problem.
[00:18:26] Speaker C: If you look at an oak tree, you know, hard mass, and we've talked about this before, we're just going to hit it again. How long does it take for that.
[00:18:33] Speaker D: Tree to produce mass in optimal conditions? 20, 25 years, you know, after say a Clear cut or something like that to where they're really start. Starting to get good crowns on them.
[00:18:45] Speaker C: And that's something we don't. You know, it's tough for us to look at folks like myself that aren't, you know, don't look at forestry the way you do is to, you have to look at our, Our job is the future as well. And that's what, that's where you have to look. When we go in and do a clear cut or a prescribed fire for that matter, we're not looking at tomorrow because obviously we, we burn a place and there's some wildlife that, that probably has gotten disturbed there. But when you look at the 20 or 30 years beyond that, that's what our job is.
[00:19:16] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. A lot of times you're thinking 100 years out, which is very difficult for people to think in that. Those terms. But as a forester, that's what you're looking. What do you want this stand to look like in 100 years? And then what steps do you have to take to make it look like that?
[00:19:31] Speaker C: That is hard to do. I mean, when you look at. We're only here for a short time and we all want to leave it better than we found it. I mean, that's pretty much everybody has that passion at the agency, no matter where you're working and especially in the forestry stuff. But habitat for you, does it have anything else to add to that?
[00:19:48] Speaker D: Yeah, I guess the only thing I would add, I mean, and they both did a really good job talking about it, just to expand a little bit more on, on what Dan was saying. You know, when you're looking, it gets really complicated when you start to get to the species level because they all require different habitats. So you have your, you have your early successional habitat specialist, but then you also have your late successional.
But even those require different habitats as well. So whether it goes back to the grouse and they need that young, healthy forest growing, they also need the pole timber, they need the mature timber because then you're getting into nesting and brooding habitats and things like that. And then even your late successional species, same thing, they still require that, that younger habitat.
So looking at that on a landscape level, that's our job is to try and figure out how do we best make that property, that game land, you know, the best that it can possibly be. It takes a lot of planning with a lot of. We bring teams together with our biologists or GIS folks or land management folks and really sit down and try to come up with the best plan that we can possibly come up with.
[00:20:58] Speaker C: Yeah. And when you look at the game commission, not that we only have 1.5 x 5.3. I forget. What's the total number?
[00:21:06] Speaker A: It's almost 1.6 now.
[00:21:07] Speaker C: See, now you should work in marketing. I used to get in trouble for saying that, but, you know, that's the land that we can control the habitat on, like our partners, like dcnr. I mean, obviously it's public hunting and it's, you know, but their goals aren't the same as ours.
It's important that our sportsmen and women out there understand that. That, like, we are creating habitat, timbering, harvesting, you know, burning whatever you want. We're doing this for wildlife, and that's our main focus.
[00:21:34] Speaker B: Yeah. I think when people see a timber harvest on. On the game lands, they can be confident that, you know, we've done that harvest and thought a lot about where it should be, how big it should be, what shape even it should be, and that. That we've decided that that is the best thing to do in that spot for whatever the suite of wildlife species that live there, not just for now, but for the next hundred years, like Scott said.
[00:22:02] Speaker C: And, you know, like I cut you off. I'm sorry.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: I was gonna say they both kind of touched on it. Scott touched on the browse and the impact and how they can blink out, and Dan touched on the Swedish species. Well, we have to remember when we're dealing with deer browse, so as an agency, it's just much our responsibility to create habitat for deer as anything else.
[00:22:23] Speaker D: But.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: But what we got to remember is deer are eating the habitat of everything else. So when those, even themselves, even their own habitat. So when those species blink out because they've been browsed back four times, that's grouse habitat that blinks out at the same time. So it becomes a very difficult balance of what's browse and what's something else is cover.
And that's where we keep running into problems at times.
[00:22:46] Speaker C: Sure, I know, like in your part of the world, North Central, where a lot of the elk management's going into. And you can see just over the last six years, you can just see the increase that. That habitat. You know, what. What we're doing up there on the ground is working for other species, especially like wild turkeys and. And, you know, those open areas. But when you think about turkeys, for instance, you know, they. They need nesting cover. The brooding part of that is so important, you know, where they can stay away from predators. Like when you have the best habitat, you know, you know, it helps in them keeping away from out everything out there that's going to eat them, including us, you know, as a predator.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And when you think about what good turkey, you know, brood cover is, it's, you know, it's short stuff.
And if you're in a situation where, you know, deer browse or some other problem is kind of inhibiting your ability to develop that kind of thick understory layer or even in a more of a field setting, you know, if things are kind of like, kept from developing that complexity, that's gonna be more likely that broods are gonna get predated and not be successful.
[00:23:57] Speaker C: I mean, all animals out there, it's rough life out there, no matter how you look at it. I mean, there's, you know, I always say when a turkey's hatched out of that egg, that mama hen's teaching them that everything out there is trying to eat them. And they're not very smart, but they're good at getting away from people, you know, or getting away from predators for sure. You know, when talk about deer and pressure and when we see that our population may be, you know, we're out of carrying capacity even on if somebody has their own private place. What are some of the things we look for when we know that, like, we probably have too many deer on the landscape.
[00:24:28] Speaker D: So when you really start to look at the browse, you know, if you start to see you're not getting regeneration, you have light coming in through the canopy of the trees and it's hitting the ground and you don't have good desirable regeneration.
You're starting to see a lot more of your invasives and things like that that the deer don't prefer.
That's when you're starting to hit a tipping point that you need to do something, you know, and, and sometimes if, if the, the deer herd is. Is still, you know, they're rising, but they're not completely out of balance.
Sometimes putting tops on the, on the forest floor and things like that to protect them. You know, it will work. But, you know, once you get to a point where it's just too high, I mean, they can, they're lazy, I will tell you that. You know, that's one. One of the things we joke about that the deer like us, you know, they, they get into tops and stuff, they'll go around them and, and feed around them and stuff like that, but they start getting to the point where, you know, they're getting really Hungry. They're going to go right into the tops and everything else, and then that stuff rots down and then you don't have anything.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: I've got a little row of. Of dogwoods I planted at my house, going into a field, and there's a deer trail that goes past kind of the end dogwood. And they browse that one every day. They walk by, it looks like, but they never browse the second one. They just don't bother. So, you know, in that case, quick.
[00:25:54] Speaker C: Easy meal, they're happy, they're going into.
[00:25:55] Speaker B: The field to eat. They don't need to go over in the bushes and eat the other ones. But, you know, that one's all kind of browsed down. So, yeah, they'll. They take the easy path like, like.
[00:26:04] Speaker C: Anybody kind of like when we open the fridge, we grab something real quick and instead of going for all that work.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: Exactly. This on the way by.
[00:26:09] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. You know, and to your point, too, when they, when you start seeing pressure on invasives or mountain laurel or something like that, I mean, obviously those deer are hungry.
[00:26:18] Speaker D: Yes, absolutely.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: One thing I think is good to look at that, like most folks would be able to tell is if you're, if you're cutting some small trees down, if they're, if they're hardwood trees, like, like red maple, oak, even, even black cherry, most of those trees will stump sprouts.
That's like a strategy they have for survival. So if you cut them down, especially if they're small, or if, like, maybe the township or highway department's cutting some stuff down along the, along the road or under a power line near you, and you can kind of take a look at what's happening there, those should be sending up sprouts. That's just, that's what they do from the root system. And if you're seeing those sprouts kind of. If you look out there and you don't see any sprouts and you go and kind of dig around and, you know, there's the stump and you can see kind of all the sprouts that they tried to sprout and are just kind of getting, getting browsed right at the, at the stump, that's. That's probably a bad sign.
And then, you know, maybe if you're seeing them get going a little bit, but have a lot of. Lot of browse on them, okay, maybe it's a little bit better.
So that's, that's the thing. I look at a lot, and I think most people would be able to kind of kind of pick that out pretty, pretty easy to kind of get a feel for it.
[00:27:32] Speaker D: They're preferential browsers, so they're going to take the foods they want to eat first, just like we would, you know. So you start to see if you have a very diverse understory with a lot of wildflowers and things like that, then the bet's probably that you got a pretty low deer population.
[00:27:46] Speaker C: You're the first forester that didn't say Forbes in the history of my six years here at the Game Commission.
[00:27:53] Speaker B: We're learning.
[00:27:54] Speaker C: Yeah, but it can't be all wildflowers.
[00:27:59] Speaker D: No, there are a lot of sweets, different ones like that. Like if you see trillium or which hobble or something like that, then you have probably you have a good deer population that's pretty low, but those are the first things that are going to blink out. So if you're going in and you're not seeing anything like that on the ground, then you have a problem. You know, it's building.
And then you'll start to see your oaks are getting nipped. If your brambles aren't there, you know, if you can't grow raspberry, BlackBerry, things like that, elderberry, you know, then you have a problem.
[00:28:32] Speaker C: And that's, you know, when you, when you look at the big picture, that's how we're managing our deer herd. You know, wildlife management takes all that stuff into consideration and the allocations and, and that's why it's so important. And we stress this a lot. Like harvesting does is crucial, especially like in the big woods. You know, certain. And not every, not every tract of land has a carrying capacity that's the same. Some deer, some per square mile is more and less. And you know, when you, when you look at some of that big woods country, you know, there's not as many deer in that area, but they might not have the habitat to suit that. You know, not every place can have 30 deer per square mile.
[00:29:11] Speaker D: Right?
[00:29:11] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, if you're. A lot of the places, you know, I work and hunt and spend time on or kind of poor mountaintop soil, sandy soil, mountain laurel, huckleberry. That's just kind of how they are.
They're not going to have the same carrying capacity probably as some of your better sites, Scott and kind of Clarion county or Jefferson county or something, probably.
And so, yeah, the fewer deer there will have a bigger impact on the habitat. That's. That's for sure.
[00:29:46] Speaker C: When we even look back to the Gary Alt days, you Know, some of his program was way not was misunderstood. You know, the antler restriction was part of it. And that was the byproduct that came out of this, that we definitely have a better age class of bucks out there. But, you know, he went on a drastic herd reduction. I mean, just putting it on the table. But at that time, the foresters, the agency, we're seeing regrowth happen.
[00:30:13] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:30:14] Speaker C: And, you know, I'm not saying that that's where we have to go, but we definitely have to get, you know, in certain areas, that herd has to be in check, and that's. We encourage everybody. You know, this year, you know, those are way better eating than bucks anyway. You know, put one in your freezer. I mean, if most of the areas that we need help, it's one more deer per square mile that would make a difference.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: And I think what.
What people have to kind of come to a realization when deer are way out of balance with a habitat, they are a bigger impact on the forest than humans are.
[00:30:50] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:30:50] Speaker A: I don't think there's. I've seen places where that's not even a question that they have a bigger impact on the woods than we do. And that's when you start getting to the point where you're that out of balance.
That's when the drastic herd reduction comes in.
[00:31:04] Speaker B: I think to kind of go back to some stuff Scott was saying earlier ties into that when you have, you know, there's one thing where we're doing a habitat treatment, trying to meet some habitat objective for grouse or woodcock or whatever, we can't do it because everything's getting browsed. It's a whole nother thing. When at kind of a landscape level, you have oak forest, for example, that have no regen, no seedlings in them, no oak seedlings, and then they are susceptible to being killed by spongy moth, being killed by a late frost or two, and wholesale conversion of oak ecosystems, oak forests, to something else.
And that's where I think deer can at times kind of just magnify other problems that we have. Invasives, pests, you know, just natural kind of weather, things like the late frost, where maybe if the deer herd was a little more imbalanced and we had some, you know, oak regeneration, being able to develop certain places once when those catastrophic events occurred, we could kind of intervene then and, you know, kind of turn that more toward, you know, an oak stand or whatever is going to be good for wildlife in the long term.
But when oaks blink out and big ones and there's no seedlings. You're kind of.
Your options are pretty limited. I mean, acorns don't blow in the wind. You know, they're. If they're. The seedlings weren't there, you can't get them. So you could be looking at, in those scenarios, you know, century or many centuries of loss of oak habitat on that site. And I think it's just not. You can't take for granted how important oak forests are for all sorts of wildlife, not just from the mass production, but nest sites. And turkeys love roosting and big wolfie oak trees and they get good, big den holes in them and just all sorts of important things.
[00:33:06] Speaker C: Yes, it really opens your eyes when you talk as hunters. We're all kind of focused on big gang. Except you, Scott.
[00:33:16] Speaker D: I dabble in a little bit of everything.
[00:33:17] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, everything. As a matter of fact, I even heard that you even dabbled in some hog hunting down south and kind of impressed those guys.
Forrester from Pennsylvania come down there and showed them how to shoot hogs. And, you know, usually when you fire on a hog, they're gone, but you kept them busy. From my understanding, rapid fire. I got you.
I got you. And we're gonna talk about squirrel dogs before we leave here and your love for squirrel hunting, because I think that's something that we all probably grew up on and we all forget about. And, you know, one of the best ways to introduce a young person to hunting is squirrel hunting. And squirrels can teach you a whole lot about the woods too, for sure.
[00:33:57] Speaker D: They sure can.
[00:33:58] Speaker C: So you talked a little bit about this earlier and, you know, we get a lot of questions and we're going to have to cover it a little bit is the exclosures, deer fencing and some of the things that we're doing on our game lands. And, and, you know, basically, you know, how does it benefit the, the forest, the habitat when we put those fences up?
[00:34:16] Speaker D: Yeah. So once again, going back to kind of what the other guys touched on here, of, of how much time and effort we put into managing particular stands of timber on our game lands for habitat. And you can look at some of these stands that management predated me. So I'd been in the region for 22 years now, and you're talking 25 to maybe 30 years of different events that, that have taken place that, that we've done management to try and get that young growth going. And basically the, the deer fence is the last resort. You know, you're trying all types of different tools different methods to try and get that regeneration coming. And, and you know, looking at what's the next step? Well, the next step is if we don't have regeneration, we can't make a next step because we can't cut any more trees. We don't want to deplete the seed source that we still have there.
So that's when we get the trigger of, okay, well, we're going to have to go ahead and fence this so we can move it to the next step, you know, and eventually not all, but most of those are going to go to a clear cut to get that young early succession. And I'll be the first to admit, I hate deer fences. Absolutely hate them. You know, I wish we lived in a world where we didn't have to use them.
But things being what they are, you know, they're an integral part of what we do now.
[00:35:39] Speaker C: Yeah, again, you're looking at 100 years out and what we're going to leave there. You know, how do we choose where we put those fences up? Dan?
[00:35:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, so kind of touching on what Scott said there. I think when you're, you're arriving at a deer fence through a process of elimination, you've, you've identified a place you want to say, let's say, for example, make young forest habitat, you want to regenerate it, turn, turn an old forest into a younger forest. A lot of planning has gone into that decision has nothing to do with the deer or deer fencing. It's, you know, that's where the planning team is, looking at the game lands, looking at the forest types and deciding that, you know, we need to get a certain amount of young forest kind of interspersed on the landscape. So a lot of the planning is at that level, you know, where we want to kind of change the habitat conditions. And then, you know, often we do, like Scott said, we will do some of the habitat work up front. You know, you go into a kind of a mature forest typical in Pennsylvania, there's not enough light for new seedlings to grow. There might be interfering plants that we don't like in there, invasives or something. So we're gonna open it up through maybe a timber harvest or we call like a non commercial cutting where we just cut some smaller trees that we don't like, get a little light on the ground. So we kind of deal with the light issue. Then we're gonna deal with the interfering plant issue if there is one. So if there's invasives or something, we're gonna deal with those.
We do that through mowing, herbicide, prescribed fire, all different ways.
And at that point, if you're still kind of not seeing the development you want, you're going to have indicators at that point that deer are the kind of last thing that we may have to have to address. And so we decide where to put fences based on kind of assessing all those factors, looking at them and kind of determining that that's the last thing.
There's enough light, there's not a bunch of invasives in there competing. That's where I tend to look at the stump sprout situation. Are they getting browsed, are seedlings getting browsed in there? And at that point we start to really look at where exactly a fence would make the most sense. We're going to try to be super efficient with fences. We're going to try to make them in large squarish kind of shapes.
[00:38:12] Speaker C: Dan, how do you decide, you know, how big that fenced in area is?
[00:38:16] Speaker B: Yeah, so we usually they're in the 40 to 60 acre range. Something that's big enough that it's efficient to build the fence. You know, if you have a tiny fence that's, you know, less efficient to put it up so big enough that we're going to, you know, when we do the harvest and take the fence down, we have a nice patch of, of young forest habitat. Sometimes we do put bigger ones up if it, if it makes sense, kind of we can use some roads and you know, less impact on, on the site.
And sometimes if you have a really important stand that's 10 or 15 acres, we will put a smaller fence up. If it's something that's like really critical to, to protect.
But we try to, you know, stay in that kind of middle size range. Is that about what you guys.
[00:39:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's important to point out like you're not going to see hundred, two, hundred acre fences on game lands. Never happens.
[00:39:10] Speaker C: Cost effective.
[00:39:11] Speaker A: It's not, I mean it's not just cost effective. Maintenance is a problem and we just don't want that big of an impact on wildlife movement.
[00:39:19] Speaker B: Yeah, if you have a hundred acre fence, it's hard to line it up somewhere that you're probably not going to be impacting wildlife movement somehow. So you know, try to break it up into smaller areas. And you know, for a lot of wildlife, turkeys, I would say probably deer and lots, you know, certainly rabbits and, and grouse. Having some more patchiness is going to be better than kind of a big, big area that's, that's all the same age class. So you know that, that 40 to 50 acre size is a nice size.
[00:39:52] Speaker C: I know like when I hunt a lot down south in Alabama, my buddy is a forester and they manage a ton of ground down there and they scalable. It could never happen here, but they do checkerboard. I mean, that's how they manage their timber. You know, obviously they have pine trees and they get cut a lot. So it's a little different ball game. But that's what they. When you looked at it from the air, that's how they look at their habitat types.
[00:40:14] Speaker B: And that's, I mean, that's even similar to what we're going for. It's just we're not going to be following those straight lines.
[00:40:20] Speaker C: We have mountains and hills which they don't have.
[00:40:23] Speaker B: Right.
You know, that sort of creates its own diversity. When you have a, you know, big canyon or something, you can't.
[00:40:28] Speaker D: And the timber types are different too. So when you look at, when we're selecting those sites, you know, it might, you're. You're pretty much just putting the fence around a timber stand.
So if it's a 30 acre stand or a 40 acre stand, it's an oak stand. That's what you're putting the fence around. And it may be adjacent to a tulip poplar stand or a cherry stand or a maple stand, something like that, you know, so that's kind of dictating the size and then the placement of the fences.
[00:40:56] Speaker C: Do you have any, do you guys have any recommendation for an app that's out there that, that folks that would have some interest in? You know, some people, honestly, when they think of an oak tree, they think of a white oak and that's the only oak they know. But like, is there an app or something you can download on your phone to identify tulip poppers or any that the average person like myself can put on my phone and go out there. Is there something you guys have recommended? Foundation Seek.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: These are the worst three people use the Seek app.
[00:41:25] Speaker A: S E E K Seek.
[00:41:26] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:41:27] Speaker A: It's.
It struggles with big trees at times because you can't really get up to them. But leaves, it likes leaves. It just snap a picture of it and it'll identify it for like I've.
[00:41:37] Speaker C: Even on my little place, I've identified some stuff. I'm like, what the heck's this? And I take a picture and send it to Gus. I'm like, what is this? Oh, it's trout lily. You didn't know what that was. And Now I do.
[00:41:44] Speaker A: He used to.
[00:41:46] Speaker C: Is that what it was?
[00:41:47] Speaker B: Probably, yeah. I think I'm always trying to get better at Forbes wildflowers, even grasses, you know, I'm trying to get better at. So, you know, I think my phone will. You can just take a picture of it. And sometimes it knows what it is, but sometimes it's wrong. So I don't know.
[00:42:03] Speaker C: And you can get that on a flip phone.
[00:42:06] Speaker B: I wish I still had a flip phone.
[00:42:10] Speaker C: So, you know, just ending on the fences. How do you know when that fence is ready to come down? When. When do we decide when that's coming down?
[00:42:17] Speaker D: The easiest thing to say is when the regeneration is high enough that the deer can't affect it anymore, which is probably once you get about five feet, you know, over five feet. Because if you think if you're in an area where with a high deer density and you see a browse line, it's usually 4ft or lower. So once your. Your average seedling height is above that, so getting to 6, 7, 8ft tall, the fence can come down. But.
And that's generally, I would say historically looking at our area, it's probably about six years on certain types of stands. But, you know, it also depends on if it's an oak stand. And once again, we're looking at the. The fences just. It's another tool in your closet that you can use. And you may have to do additional steps, you know, to ensure that you're getting that oak regeneration. Because once again, the problem with deer fences is we do like browsing. We like having deer on the landscape. They are a critical part, and they can really help you out in lower numbers. But as soon as those numbers go high, they hurt you. They also hurt you when you have no deer in them, you know, and you get. You lose that preferential browsing in places. So your pin cherries, different things like that, they may really take off. So. And while they are all beneficial species, you know, don't want to go down that trap of. Well, these are native species. Are they bad? No, they're not bad. Everything is really good. It's just in its place. We don't want a monoculture of anything. We don't want to take an oak stand and flip it to a birch stand. We don't want to flip it to a pin cherry stand or something like that.
But, you know, having that fence up, it gives you other tools that you can use. You can use prescribed fire, you can do some weeding, you can come in and basically just look at it. Like it's your garden. You know, you got your tomato plant and you're just kind of plucking the weeds around it. So you're picking which trees you want to grow and then you're just taking out the stuff that's competing with it and allowing it to grow bigger. Better crowns produce more mast, whether that's hard or soft mast for the wildlife.
[00:44:20] Speaker C: You said something that's crucial.
And I think that we all have to get back to this point is number one, we love deer. Absolutely. And we want deer in there. And they are part of how we manage the forest. And they're always going to be a part till we're long gone.
And you know, when we talk about hunting and shooting, like we don't want to shoot every deer. So many people think the game Commission, when they see the allocations, the numbers, they're like they want to kill them all. That's not what we want.
Our responsibility is to manage that herd to the habitats that they live in. And that's, you know, if you had a perfect world, you know, that's where we'd be. We'll probably never get there, in all honesty. But, you know, we all love deer and we want them there. And like you said, they are a part of how we manage things. We got to take that calculation into how that forest is going to come back. But you know, the other thing is when they, if somebody's out there on a game lands in your area or somewhere, even on state forests, you can hunt inside those fences. And there's mandoes.
[00:45:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. There's, I think, a misconception I hear from folks a lot even in the forestry community is, ah, you know, a lot of fences have deer in them, which is true. That part's true.
But that having a couple deer in the fence renders the fence kind of useless. It's, you know, it's not working anymore. And that just really isn't, isn't the case. You know, a 40 or 50 acre fence with it with a couple deer in it behaves pretty much like a fence with no deer in it. There's so much browse in there that, you know, you see some browse inside the fence, but everything's still functioning. So although it's pretty common to get deer in fences, tree falls on them in a storm and a couple of deer get in or something.
We hope people will get in there in deer season and get those deer out. And we want you to. And I think people should know that hunting deer in a deer fence Is not like shooting fish in a barrel.
Especially if you're talking maybe a three, four year old clear cut with all the, all the top playing everywhere and brambles and I mean it's thick cover. It's more like hunting rabbits than deer. I mean you sometimes almost have to step on them to get them, to get them to jump up. So it's not, I don't consider it to be easy to do, but I would always, always encourage people to do it for sure.
[00:46:40] Speaker C: I think myself as a buck and I knew there was five does inside there, I'd be trying like crazy to get in that, in that place. I mean, and I mean you can use that to your advantage at some point, but I mean you can. And there's other opportunities inside there too, I'm sure. Grouse and.
[00:46:55] Speaker B: Oh yeah, oh yeah, lots of grouse.
[00:46:57] Speaker A: Bears, Bears love.
[00:46:58] Speaker B: Bears love fences.
[00:46:59] Speaker D: Rabbits.
[00:47:00] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, turn your beagles loose in one.
[00:47:05] Speaker B: I mean pretty much, you know, deer and elk are really the only critters that aren't, aren't getting in there. Yeah, bears go right up over them and you know, because they tend to have a lot of BlackBerry and raspberry in them because they're not getting browsed. Bears just love to get in there in the late summer.
[00:47:23] Speaker C: And we kind of hit on this earlier. I just want to recap like how important the management of whitetails and management of deer is to all the other species that are out there. I mean really, it's a keystone species. When you think about conservation. We wouldn't be here doing what we're doing today without white tailed deer. When you look across the country, you know that's the most sought after species. It creates the most, it generates the most funding for conservation, whether it's state agency or outside the state agency. And you look at PR dollars from ammunition, you know, most deer hunters like to shoot their guns. And when you think about whitetails, but you also think about how the benefits of what we do as an agency for all those other species. And you know, so many times the deer is the only thing we talk about but like we hit on a little earlier but just you know, talk about inside whether it's a fence or whether it's prescribed fire or anything that we do when it relates to, you know, spongy moth spraying, how it benefits everything out there from even to your past to like golden winged warblers.
[00:48:22] Speaker A: So it's, I touched on a little bit before when, when the deer are out of balance, they're the most impactful thing on the habitat of every other animal in the state of Pennsylvania.
[00:48:34] Speaker B: Deer.
[00:48:35] Speaker A: These guys can't do anything for grouse habitat in the face of high deer numbers when deer are in balance. So we talked a little bit about the defoliation and being imbalanced.
2006 through 2009, the state got absolutely hammered. Oaks were defoliated all over the place.
Tons of mortality. This was right after the herd reduction from spongymon. Yeah.
So this was right after the herd reduction.
Deer numbers were low. You have places going down the allegheny front.
So for us, it'd be like gamelands. 33, 60, 108 going down the front there.
That came back to oak that regenerated at a time when you had all that light hitting the ground and you had deer numbers in balance. The forest was able to basically take care of itself in those conditions. And that would have been great grouse habitat at the time. Appalachian cottontails would have been great at the time because it was that thick cover. And it just. It happened because everything was in balance.
[00:49:36] Speaker B: It was great deer habitat.
[00:49:37] Speaker A: Great deer habitat. We grew a whole bunch of them. Yep, that's. And now as those stands develop, they're going to be great squirrel habitat because they still have a hard mass component. So that's crucial when they get out of balance. Like if that would happen in places today, those stands aren't coming back. They're gone.
[00:49:55] Speaker C: I mean, we all want to go out getting our favorite deer stand and see 20 deer. I mean, that's. We all love that. But like, reality is, I need one deer. Well, that's what I was gonna talk to you about. I heard that you have no call factor. If it comes in front of you, it's over.
[00:50:08] Speaker B: My. I've seen it.
[00:50:09] Speaker A: Yep. My standards are defined by the Pennsylvania game laws.
If it's got three points on one side, it's a totally legitimate deer. If it has no points, totally legitimate deer. Other than that, I have no standards.
[00:50:23] Speaker C: You're a forester's dream, right?
[00:50:26] Speaker B: I'm pretty much with him. I wish I had standards, but I'm.
[00:50:29] Speaker C: Just, you know, it's to each their own. I mean, that's how I look at it. You know, however, and you know, when come down to Scott, you like to hunt everything. I mean, if we had a dragonfly season, you'd be out there today.
[00:50:41] Speaker D: My mother in law used to say that if they had a mouse season, I would go after mice.
[00:50:46] Speaker C: And you like to do a lot of things with dogs, which is, you know, when you look at rabbit dogs or coonhound. Like it's, it's, it's not forgotten, but like I remember when I was a kid, everybody had a coon dog, you know, or a couple rabbit, a couple beagles. And you have squirrel dogs, which is something that's really cool. And we need to come go along one day and whenever you're ready, we'll do it and you know, talk about that, talk about what you do. And with, especially with the squirrel dogs, I'm sure you take a lot of youngsters.
[00:51:14] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. Actually, so for about 12 years now, I've had mountain curs, and I started hunting with dogs very early on. My dad always had a coonhound, we always had beagles. So it was in my blood from a, from an early age I had.
[00:51:30] Speaker C: A subscription to Full Crawl, Full cry.
[00:51:32] Speaker D: Magazine, the whole nine. And I just, I absolutely loved it. You know, kind of got away from it when I was in college and throwing things, but when I came back, I was looking at possibly getting another coon hound. And then I started read. That was when the Internet was really starting to kick up and I started seeing more about squirrel dogs. And I loved squirrel hunting because like I said growing up, I mean, that's what we did.
And to be able to put the two together, be able to squirrel hunt and do it with a dog, that really intrigued me. So I started doing more research, went to Kentucky, picked up a puppy and trained her and got her, her running squirrels and just absolutely have had a blast with that dog. And then of course, you know, like anything, they're like potato chips. You can't just have one, right? And then my, you know, we just kept getting more and more and more. But it was great because my oldest daughter, when she was first starting to, to get into hunting, that's how I, I took her out and introduced her into hunting with the squirrel dogs.
And it was funny because, you know, it took her a couple years because it's not as easy as people think, you know, when, when people talk about squirrel hunting with dogs, like, oh, that's easy, that's easy, you know, so, no, it's a lot harder with a dog than it is if you want to shoot numbers. Go still hunt, you know, spot and stalk. You're going to kill more squirrels that way. But if you're really into the, into having a hound or, you know, just getting out there with the dog and adding that to makes it a lot of fun because basically you just kind of hang out and the dog does all the Work, they go out. They. They use all of their senses, the mountain curs especially.
So they're listening for squirrels, they're smelling the squirrels. If they see them, they run them to a tree and then basically they start barking. So coming from a coon hunting background, it's great because it's just like coon hunting, but only the daytime, you know. And I can remember my daughter telling me whenever she was about 11 years old, sitting in the tree stand with me, and she said, you know, dad, I got to thinking about this. If I can shoot a squirrel in the head with a.22 at the top of an oak tree, shooting a deer ought to be pretty easy.
[00:53:42] Speaker C: Exactly. There's so much to be said about that, too. As we look in society today, you know, mainstream, you know, you see a kid out there and a buck comes in a food plot and they shoot, and it's, you know, it's got incredible set of antlers and never been squirrel hunting. We all grew up probably going out there and learning about where those squirrels are at, where they're cutting nuts and learning how to be a good marksman. And, you know, when we look at introducing younger folks or new hunters to the sport, which we need to manage wildlife, small game, squirrel hunting, rabbit hunting is very important. And I think we all should just take a step back once in a while and think about that.
[00:54:17] Speaker A: We need to take a lesson from fishing.
You don't start your kids fishing for muskies. You start with bluegills and a bobber.
[00:54:24] Speaker C: I caught creek chubs.
[00:54:25] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:54:26] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:54:27] Speaker A: And why, you know, it's the same thing with hunting. There's.
It's a lot easier to get kids into fishing because you throw a bobber out there and bluegill gets. It goes down, you got them. Squirrels are the same way. Even if you don't end up with anything, it's activity all day. You're out. It's beautiful weather. There's. You miss them, you hear them, you see them.
[00:54:46] Speaker D: They're not on their phones.
[00:54:48] Speaker B: They're not on their phones.
[00:54:49] Speaker A: The kids can talk if they want. You're walking along.
[00:54:52] Speaker B: Stakes are a lot lower.
[00:54:53] Speaker A: Stakes are a lot lower. You're not sitting in on the ground. It's 35 degrees out and half rain. And it's a wonderful time to have kids out. And we need to take that lesson from fishing. You don't start with muskies. You start with bluegills.
[00:55:04] Speaker C: It's a great analogy. When we come do that, we need. We want A to Z, like, start to finish from skinning. And show us your favorite recipe, because squirrels are wonderful when, you know, on the table.
[00:55:13] Speaker D: Yeah. Some of the best hunts that I've ever had Were bringing a group of kids out and just laughing because, you know, just like us, we like to, you know, beat on each other for things, and they'll. They'll just sit there. It's same thing, you know, they see the squirrel, but then you also see the camaraderie, you know, and other ones wanting them. Okay. You know, you met. You take the shot. I got the last one. You take the shot this time.
[00:55:35] Speaker C: Well, hunting's way more than just pulling the trigger.
[00:55:37] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:55:38] Speaker C: I mean, when you look at the whole process, like you talked about, and in that trip, we have to have a sample of your venison pastrami, Because I heard it's the best in the world.
[00:55:48] Speaker D: I don't know about the best, but it's pretty good.
[00:55:53] Speaker C: So when you. Let's just go through this, and we'll get out of here. And if there's anything else you want to talk about, we'd be glad to do that. But, like, if you had a favorite when it came to hunting, what would it be?
[00:56:04] Speaker D: That's tough. Depends on the season.
[00:56:06] Speaker C: Okay, fair enough.
Do you have a favorite, Dan, or do you like it all?
[00:56:11] Speaker B: I really like fall turkey hunting a lot.
I've been getting the last few years into woodcock hunting. Not like with a dog, just. Just. Just bumbling around. I think woodcock are really cool, so I'm having fun doing that lately.
Yeah. And I just. There's something about, you know, heading out in deer season with a doe tag and you can just kind of wander out in the mountains. You're not. There's no pressure.
Just kind of seeing country and being able to bring a doe back with you is a really good. Really good feeling.
[00:56:47] Speaker C: You have a favorite.
[00:56:48] Speaker A: God, I love squirrel hunting.
[00:56:50] Speaker C: No kidding.
[00:56:50] Speaker A: Especially that September timeframe. It's the hardest time because you can't see them, but the weather's just spectacular. You can just. I've always taken the kids out squirrel hunting from the time they were five, six years old. That's hands down my favorite.
[00:57:06] Speaker C: So I do have. I do have a question for folks that are tuning in, because you guys all spend a lot of time out there in the woods, and we talk about a lot of the forestry practices and stuff that we're doing.
If you were going to a new area, especially in the big woods, you know, what would be one of the first couple things that you would want to pay attention to, you know, when, when you have your boots on the ground every day and I'm sure that you all are scouting every day that you're out there in places that you're looking for new places to go, you know, take a look at during hunting season. What would be some of the things, and I'll start with you Paul, that you would just, you know, high level advice for folks to go out and just pay attention to that. Maybe they didn't pay attention in the.
[00:57:48] Speaker A: Past and I think we've kind of touched on in a roundabout way today. It's that you're looking for those changes in conditions where young forest meets up with old forest or that riparian area that runs along the creek.
[00:58:00] Speaker C: You have to talk English. Right there.
[00:58:02] Speaker A: Crick bottom.
[00:58:03] Speaker C: Okay, perfect.
[00:58:04] Speaker A: Where the creek bottom runs up against different type of woods and you get that little bit of different structure and different cover. It's anywhere where you have those changes coming together. Some of that you can just read from the map. Dan talked earlier about saddles and being able to read that.
To me it's always been the worst thing you can look for is something that is big and plain.
It's that change in characteristics and you can find some of that from a map. I mean you have all, everything in your hand these days. You can look at the aerial photography and you can see changes in forest type just by looking at the COVID Because you don't need to know what it is, you just need to know that it's different and that's a great place to start.
[00:58:42] Speaker C: An old timer when I was really young told me I was somewhere and you know, when the big deer craze just started happening, I was probably 16, I was in Missouri and, and he said, just remember this, you can't catch 10 pound bass when there's no 10 pound bass in the lake. And when you think about that like how many times anytime you're in the woods, it's not a waste of time. But if you're in the wrong place, you're not gonna see anything, you know, and that's, you know, that's where your advantage of being out there and being able to read that woods and know what's out there helps you. How about you, Danny?
[00:59:14] Speaker B: I'll jump on that a little bit and just point out that things change in the woods.
[00:59:18] Speaker C: That's a big year, that's a big.
[00:59:19] Speaker B: Over the decades and if it, you know, maybe a place where you, you know, there's a transition point, a difference in Habitat. Well, that won't stay that way forever necessarily. I mean, if it's a correct bottom, it'll. It'll be there. But, you know, if there's a timber harvest and you've been hunting it when it's young and brushy and lots of browse, there will come a time when that thing is 15, 20 years old, when it's not going to provide those same benefits anymore. We'll go somewhere else. So be willing to move around, look for those changes and transition places in country that has oak.
Just keep your eyes up in the trees late in the summer looking for acorns.
Find where there's going to be food that's going to be not just deer, but a bunch of wildlife species.
[01:00:11] Speaker C: Because we don't have oaks every.
I mean, certain trees don't produce nuts every year.
[01:00:16] Speaker B: No. Sometimes you have a year where it's patchy, and if you can find a patch that's making acorns or.
A lot of the places I hang out in, hickory is kind of limited on the landscape. So it's kind of a specialty thing. So if you find a hickory grove that's making hickory nuts, that could be. It all comes back to squirrels. Yeah, I guess I'm thinking about squirrels there.
[01:00:40] Speaker A: Everything else is going to be there.
[01:00:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
So, yeah, just be flexible. Don't just because a place was good one year, might not be good the next year. You know, keep moving, keep looking around.
[01:00:50] Speaker C: What's one of the problems that we have is Pennsylvania hunters? Because I've. I feel that even going to other places, we have that place that we always love to go. And you kind of like, ah, I probably should give it one more time. But, like, when there's no more deer coming by your rock, you got to change rocks.
And, you know, we have a lot of folks that love that opening day, that spot they go to every year they've been successful. But, you know, when you're looking at more things like that, you can put the odds in your favor of having a better day of field.
[01:01:18] Speaker B: I think the deer kind of up in the. In the kind of big woods, as you call it, kind of where we hang out and hunt. The deer numbers are concentrated around where the habitat is, and there can be vast areas in between where, you know, if there hasn't been habitat work done or if there's, you know, no acorns that year that they're not, you're not going to find a whole lot. So you're going to have to, you know, get to where the Deer are concentrated. If we're talking about deer and you're going to find them, if you can find the habitat and the food that they're using that year.
[01:01:51] Speaker C: Yeah, food's crucial. I mean, and like we talked about, food cover, water. I mean, those animals need it every day.
[01:01:58] Speaker D: Yeah. So I guess I would possibly complicate it a little bit. What are we hunting? Because that's the first question I have to, you know, ask. Because if you're telling me we're going to go, we're hunting deer. Okay, well, what time of year are we hunting them? Are we going in October? You know, I would be looking at, do they have. What's the mass crop there? Are we hunt, you know, is there white oak? Those are going to be the first acorns that are dropping. The deer are going to be preferentially going for those. Then they're going to start transitioning to the other oaks. Looking at those transition stands, where you're going from the mature timber to a clear cut, that's going to be your bedding area. So they're going to be betting in that clear cut, coming into that mature timber.
Crick bottoms, you know, pinch points in the northwest.
[01:02:45] Speaker C: It's a crick. C R, I, C K. I love it.
[01:02:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a crick.
[01:02:48] Speaker C: It's a crick. Okay. Yeah.
[01:02:49] Speaker D: You know, but it the same thing with squad squirrels. You know, do we. What is the mass crop if we don't have any oaks that year? Do we have hickory nuts? Those are generally pretty reliable. So we're going to go try to find some hickory. That's the benefit of knowing the game lands pretty well. You know, where they're at. So those are the places that we're going to target are the beech nuts. That's where we're going to go. Same way with turkeys. You know, those places are magnets for.
[01:03:14] Speaker C: Wildlife and bears the same way. I mean, absolutely.
[01:03:17] Speaker D: But that's. That's where it helps to start trying to identify things.
[01:03:22] Speaker C: Sure.
[01:03:22] Speaker D: You know, I. I had an experience a couple years ago with a hunter on one of our game lands. I was stopping, checking a project. He was coming out to his truck at lunchtime and. And I said, how you doing? He's like, oh, man, they're kicking my butt. I haven't seen a deer. And I asked him, he said, where are you hunting? And he's out down over the hill. And I said, well, I wouldn't be hunting there right now. I said, you know, white. Okay, corns are on.
And he's like, I have no idea. So I took him over and I showed him what a white oak looked like and I was explaining where there were some white oak stands on that particular game lands. And he was very appreciative, you know, he was excited. So I said, yeah, man, I hope you do well.
[01:03:57] Speaker C: Yeah, once you, once you find one and you see where they've been digging around, absolutely. It keeps you engaged for sure, you know, and we talked about that. We have a new opportunity this year with that late season D map on gamelands, you know, and one thing we didn't talk about even here and we could do a whole nother. You know, pressure is an issue. I mean, no matter where you're hunting, whether it's public, private, whatever, I mean, those animals are out there to survive. And you know, too much pressure can move deer around a little bit differently. And that's another thing to take into consideration. But let's talk about that late season D map and some of the things that hunters should be looking for if they're going to go up there after the holidays.
[01:04:35] Speaker D: Yeah, get away from the road. First thing I would say is get away from the road. You know, start looking at aerial photographs or, or, you know, anything like that that you can really start to look and see where the habit. Aerial photographs are great. That's one of the most important tools that I use. Doesn't matter what species I'm hunting, I'm scouting for, I use those a lot. And just looking at the different habitats, trying to get back in to that pinch point that, that hillside with the topography that, you know, they're going to get funneled, you know, as soon as they start getting pressure, they're going to go to the first furthest point and yeah, the drags, they suck and things like that, you know, learning to bone them out, things, you know, packing them.
[01:05:16] Speaker C: Out really helps anybody that's listening that's never been in the wood with woods with a forester, you'll get a lesson on how to go places. I've been as close to hell as I've ever want to be with Hagenstaller's area one time and I don't ever want to go back, to be honest with you, but that's where the animals were.
[01:05:33] Speaker B: Yeah. And by the January season, they're going to have seen a lot of people, a lot of, you know, they're going to be back in, in the laurel or, you know, down over a mountainside somewhere and yeah, river hills and I mean, hopefully there's some snow that. That'll make life easier to. I'm really excited to hunt in the snow. I just, I love. I love doing that. We don't get a ton of opportunities in regular rifle season to do that. So I managed to get a.
A snowy day hunt in last. Last year in one of the units that was open in January. So, yeah, I'm excited to do that.
[01:06:10] Speaker C: I read a lot about the folks up in the New England area. You know, Maine, when, you know, when they're tracking. And it's one of the coolest things, like, I love. One of my goals is I want to get up there someday and do that. Like, they do it and just. Just you're intimate. I mean, you're watching what that animal's doing all day. And, you know, if we are afforded that opportunity, it is a cool opportunity to get out there and.
And lace up your boots.
[01:06:31] Speaker B: And I'd be, I'd say, like, don't be afraid to get a few folks together and move them, because at that time of year, they kind of hunker down. The weather's bad. They're going to be hunkered down. You know, they're going to be, like Scott said, away from access points.
But, you know, you might need to get a. Get a few buddies and, you know, do some. Do some little pushes and see what you can get moving.
[01:06:52] Speaker C: When you look at food that time of year, too, it's tough, and they're going to be around somewhere they're eating. I mean, what would you look for late in the year for a food source?
[01:06:59] Speaker B: That can be a tricky time.
Unless you got a really good acorn year, there's probably not going to be a ton of acorns.
[01:07:06] Speaker D: Then you're going to have to look for. Browse.
[01:07:08] Speaker B: So clear. You know, young, clear cuts would be good places to key in on.
[01:07:13] Speaker C: Awesome. We don't want to give away all your secrets yet. I mean, you got to keep some in your back pocket. But, guys, thank you so much for coming on. And number one and number two, from myself and the agency, thank you for your passion, for what you do every day, because it makes a difference out there. And, you know, if everybody can get out there and like you said and look at it, 20, 30 years, 40, 100 years from now, our job is to leave it a better place than we can. And we're so lucky to live in a state that our wildlife agency reinvests and that land's going to be here forever. So hats off to you and looking forward to.
But if you Guys have anything else to add before we sign off?
[01:07:51] Speaker A: No, I just.
I think I'm with these guys. We appreciate the opportunity to get on here and talk about what they do and talk about what forestry at the Game Commission is like. It's. It's our goal that 50 years from now, when we're all, I'm assuming, gone by then, that someone walks in and talks about this is the best habitat in Pennsylvania, and they will have no idea who any of us were, but they'll see our work.
[01:08:17] Speaker B: That's the hope.
[01:08:18] Speaker C: That's the passion. Do you still have your sweater, by the way?
[01:08:21] Speaker B: Got shrunk.
[01:08:26] Speaker C: I got you.
Anything else to add to that?
[01:08:29] Speaker B: No, I just think it would be great for folks to know that we're hunters.
We're thinking about wildlife all the time while we're doing forestry work. If you see something out there that, you know, you're scratching your head about what we were doing, we had a plan. We. You know, we had objectives, making things better.
Reach out to us, find out, and we'll. We'll kind of tell you what we were thinking.
[01:08:55] Speaker C: And we are human, and things happen and we make mistakes. I mean, it happens.
[01:08:59] Speaker B: We're doing. Doing our best out there and thinking about how people use the game lands all the time.
[01:09:07] Speaker C: Awesome.
[01:09:08] Speaker D: Yeah. Appreciate just getting the opportunity to come down and speak today. I mean, we have some of the most passionate people around. And that's true. You look at every one of our foresters, you spend a day with them, you see the passion in their eyes, and they absolutely love what they do. And as Dan touched on with. With. They're all hunters. They. They truly are thinking of hunting as they are working and how they are making things. Things better. And I'm to the point where leaving trees is. You know, I'd put a tree stand right there. You know, things like that. And when they get negative feedback, it. It affects.
[01:09:43] Speaker C: It's discouraging.
[01:09:43] Speaker D: It absolutely does. Because they. They put so much heart and effort in everything that they do, you know, but we'll keep up the good fight.
[01:09:51] Speaker C: That's right. We come to. Come to work every day, lace up our boots, and we go do it for the. It's not for us.
[01:09:56] Speaker D: Right.
[01:09:57] Speaker C: We do it for the benefit of wildlife and the future. And again, thank you for what you all do every day. Thanks for coming down to the big city today. You can give back to the country. Although it's 100 degrees outside, air condition is pretty nice today. But looking forward to the future. And thanks again, guys.
[01:10:13] Speaker D: Thank you.
[01:10:13] Speaker A: Thank you.
