Urban hunters find their niche in search for big game
PHILADELPHIA – The hunter had been perched 20 feet up a carefully placed tree stand for perhaps 15 minutes, his bow on his lap, when a deer with huge antlers appeared. He watched, noiselessly, as the buck violently fought and slammed another big male, and then, amid raucous grunting, chased a doe into a thicket of rose bushes.
Moments later, he reappeared.
“He sticks his head out, and I send an arrow right through his neck,” the hunter said. “He was the biggest deer I’ve ever seen.”
The Pope & Young Club’s official “Big Game Records of North America,” that came out in 2003, certified it as the fourth-largest whitetail deer ever taken by bow and arrow in Pennsylvania: 11 points on his antlers, an official score of 168-2/8, 226 pounds gutted.
And the location? Shot right in the city of Philadelphia.
Driving the paved streets of the fifth-largest city in America, you’re not likely to spot many hunters. Nor hear them: Only archers, who usually shoot toward the ground from a tree stand and must be within 20 or so yards for a good shot, can legally take game within the city. But the hunters are there.
A total of 261 city deer were taken by licensed hunters on private property in 2003. That number does not include another 512 shot by sharpshooters brought in by the Fairmount Park Commission to cull overgrown herds in the city’s huge system of natural lands.
Conservation experts say sharpshooters often are the only way to reduce deer populations that have grown to more than 10 times the size what the land can support, as was the case in Philadelphia’s parks. Keeping the reduced herds at healthy levels may be easier.
The idea of using volunteer hunters, rather than paid sharpshooters, to limit deer populations in densely populated cities and their immediate suburbs has been tried in various places around the country over the past decade. Among them, said Jay McAninch, president of the Vienna, Va.-based Bowhunting Preservation Alliance, have been the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul; Princeton Township, N.J.; Hilton Head Island, S.C.; Westchester County, N.Y., and the Detroit-Dearborn and Grand Rapids areas of Michigan.
McAninch, who is a strong advocate of these efforts, said he is noticing the emergence of a new generation of urban shooters who have done their “pleasure hunting” elsewhere and now are more interested in helping to manage deer populations.
“They look at it as a public service,” he said.
Pat Ford, a Philadelphia resident and longtime hunter, started bow-hunting in the city a decade ago. “I had little ones at the time,” said Ford, 45. “I would go after work and sometimes before.”
In just 15 or 20 minutes, he could be dressed in camouflage, up a tree and ready.
He took eight deer within the city during the season that ended Jan. 11 (and another four in the nearby suburbs). Two will supply his family with meat for a year. Most of the rest goes to friends and relatives.
Several years ago, Ford, who works in construction, brought together a group of guys who wanted to help cull local herds on private properties in the city’s leafy northwestern neighborhoods. In 2000, his Chestnut Archers got an invitation from a nonprofit refuge at the edge of the city.
“The deer have absolutely decimated 500 acres of green space,” said Dennis Burton, director of land restoration at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education. Just within the last few years, three subdivisions went up on adjacent browsing land, and a golf course did major development, forcing more deer to come in search of food.
The archers – who must pass Burton’s marksman tests and aim down toward the ground from tree stands even though they are not allowed to hunt while the center is open – seem to be making a difference: “There’s some tulip regeneration. Some oak and hickory starting to get a foothold.”
Still, most residents of nearby neighborhoods are not keen on having hunters on their land.
“The people don’t want to allow it because, you know, you’re killing DEER,” said Jerry Czech, the state wildlife conservation officer assigned to the city.
Kris Soffa and her husband bought their contemporary house on two bucolic acres surrounded by the nature center 18 years ago. She describes herself as an environmentalist and a community organizer.
“Hunters always asked, they phoned, they wrote letters, they put things on my windshield they begged and pleaded. I thought hunting was horrible.”
As the deer increased, her entire family came down with Lyme disease. She installed a 12-foot-high, 800-foot-long fence with four gates, and got three cats to eat the mice that carry lyme ticks through winter, and guinea fowl to eat the ticks.
A man who did work on her property had asked to hunt before, and now she said yes.
Soffa’s hunter – she allows only one – regularly scoots up an oak tree in the woods during the 10 staggered weeks of archery season. Between her and a half-dozen other city property owners, he gets eight or 10 whitetail a year.
After years of tracking bear, moose and caribou across the continent, this hunter finds his challenge in the city. Instead of outthinking deer on the move, he must position a tree stand on a small parcel; if the deer wanders onto a neighbor’s property he will have to coax it back or lose it. A good shot with a bow, unlike a rifle, must be within 20 yards.
And with less browsing land accessible to hunters, bucks in and around the city survive longer and grow bigger. Soffa’s hunter won’t say exactly where he shot the 11-pointer that landed him in the record book. It’s the same reason he won’t agree to have his name in the paper.
“You’ve got to stay out of sight, out of mind,” he said.
Animal-rights activists might take bolt cutters to his tree stands, as he said they already have. Worse, customers might be upset to learn that he hunts. Many people who don’t shoot animals are disgusted that others do.
Surveys of public attitudes toward hunting vary widely depending on how the question is phrased. But where you live makes some difference, too. A 2001 nationwide survey conducted for Ducks Unlimited by Responsive Management of Harrisonburg, Va., for example, found that 68 percent of rural residents approved of hunting vs. 60 percent of urbanites.
Barbara Riebman, a longtime animal-rights activist from the Philadelphia area, believes that all hunting is unethical. She also argues that shooting a bow and arrow in the city is inherently unsafe and that the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s stated intent to “manage” an overgrown deer population by regulating the harvest is nonsense.
“Hunters,” she said, “have manipulated the deer population to increase hunting opportunities.”