This is where I find myself. I wished for them to do a full inclusion and we got a half measure. Not what I was hoping for, but I’m not sharpening my pitch fork over it, either. They’ll get there … just not when many of us hoped they would.
The reality is they could have said “too late for this year, we’ll consider it for next.”
They did something. Some of us see something as better than nothing, others see it as worse than nothing. Neither of those standpoints is imperially wrong… nor are they imperially right. It’s how you see the change.
The reality is we will probably see it all sorted out for 26-27 and hopefully can then move on.
The biggest thing for me is that based on the days picked and the comments about over harvest it’s hard to argue that archery hunting isn’t the PGCs sole concern at this point. 9 of the 10 days picked were during archery seasons and the first 5 of them went exclusively to archery season. Heck even the archery elk season, which has a total of 27 people hunting it, got a dedicated Sunday and almost as many Sundays as pheasant season (2 days vs 3) despite pheasant season being 14 weeks longer, half of which have no deer hunting during them so no concerns about over harvest.
Same with the regular deer archery season, if you are a bow hunter you got every important Sunday added to your season, they have nothing more to want at this point. Meanwhile the flintlock hunters, who kill less than 1% of the deer, get zero days and are being told it’s due to concerns about over harvest because the PGC added 6 to 8 high impact days to the season that already kills 50% of the bucks and 30% of the does. They couldn’t even throw them a bone by running the Sundays until the end of December giving them one day and avoiding the late rifle seasons issue entirely.
And apparently they can’t open the late season to small game only as rifle hunters are too dumb to read the rules and they will go hunting on Sundays during the late rifle seasons even though they aren’t supposed to. This is despite the fact that all of the late rifle seasons take place in areas where the PGC is actively trying to reduce the number of deer so one year of over harvest shouldn’t be much of a concern and they can simply adjust tag allocations next year.
Even if they roll out all Sundays next year their choices this year set the tone that the only season they really care about is archery and they will prioritize it over all other seasons if given the opportunity. The fact that they skipped over the rest of December when they are setting out several hundred thousand dollars worth of pheasant just shows they were too preoccupied with adding opportunities for archery and making sure rifle hunters didn’t kill too many does to care about additionally opportunities for the rest of the hunters. There were 9 more Sundays they could have added to the season outside of the late rifle season with zero concerns for the deer harvest but they chose not to with no real reason stated other than “adding any Sundays to the late season could result in over harvest.”
That to me is a bigger issue and since I don’t really archery hunt that doesn’t really give me a great feeling about their priorities going forward. Will they continue to slow walk implementation in the late season for a few more years while they assess the effects of the high impact days they introduced? Are they going to shorten or remove the late rifle season due to the estimated 20k to 40k more deer that will be killed during archery season? Will the DMAP rifle season go away for the same reason?
I guess time will tell but I am definitely far more disappointed compared to how excited I was when they first announced the special meeting to add Sundays to the 2025/2026 season.
