Pennsylvania Ag Connection - Deer Permits for Surveillance Units on Sale

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Deer Permits for Surveillance Units on Sale
Pennsylvania Ag Connection - 08/03/2020

Like a good detective, deer hunters follow clues each fall to cross paths with wary white-tailed deer.

This year, they can put those investigative skills to use in helping to sniff out the potential spread of Chronic Wasting Disease, or CWD.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission is offering special Deer Management Assistance Program (DMAP) permits for eight Enhanced Surveillance Units, or ESUs. The permits, which allow hunters to take antlerless deer in the 2020-21 hunting seasons, went on sale July 30.

The purpose is for hunters to use the tags to harvest deer, and then submit the heads from those animals for CWD testing.

CWD testing occurs statewide annually. But as their name suggests, it's especially critical in Enhanced Surveillance Units.

The surveillance units are small areas within larger Disease Management Areas. They surround the spot where a CWD positive wild or captive deer was found.

What makes those CWD detections noteworthy is that they are at the leading edge of disease expansion or at least 5 miles from any other past CWD detection.

What the Game Commission -- with the help of hunters -- intends to determine is whether those CWD positive deer were outliers, meaning the only sick one in their respective areas, or a clue to a bigger problem.

The Game Commission's management goal is to limit CWD to no more than one percent of the adult deer in these units. By harvesting deer and submitting heads from those deer for testing, hunters can help crack the case on just where CWD exists and to what degree.

Such hunter cooperation is a cornerstone of the commission's new CWD Response Plan.

"The Game Commission has a CWD Response Plan," said Christopher Rosenberry, chief of the agency's game management division. "But hunters are the real key to making it work. The samples they provide from deer they harvest, especially in Enhanced Surveillance Units, help us to identify where CWD exists on the landscape, at what prevalence, and what management actions we need to take to control it."

The Game Commission will place deer-head collection bins in each unit. It will test all deer heads gathered with a valid harvest tag -- at no cost to the hunter -- and report back to those hunters with news of whether their deer tested positive for CWD or not. Locations of the deer-head collection bins can be found here: https://www.pgc.pa.gov/Wildlife/Wildlife-RelatedDiseases/Pages/ChronicWastingDisease.aspx.

The Game Commission is aiming to collect at least 250 to 300 deer heads from each unit.

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