The two-week-long season kicked off with mild temperatures and overcast skies.
Today marked the latest start of Pennsylvania’s deer rifle hunting season in years, but some hunters in the Lehigh Valley said their patience wasn’t immediately paying off.
The two-week season kicked off at 7 a.m. with overcast skies and fairly typical early December temperatures. Whether that made for a typical first day of rifle hunting depended on who was being asked and where they were hunting.
Pickup trucks and SUVs dotted the shoulder of Belfast Road, which traverses the more than 900 acres of state-owned hunting lands at Jacobsburg Environmental Education Center in Bushkill Township. The sound of gunfire was sporadic, hunters said, but a ranger with the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources said the deer were out there for those willing to look hard enough.
Said K. Naqwe, a Bethlehem resident who’s been hunting for years in the Lehigh Valley, said he hadn’t had any luck through the morning. He said he and his hunting buddy generally go to either Jacobsburg or Blue Mountain’s state game lands on opening day.
“I didn’t get one up there last year, either,” Naqwe said with a chuckle, referring to his previous efforts up on Blue Mountain, near Walnutport.
They got out early and were warming up in their car with a thermos of hot tea about 10:30 a.m. They planned to go back out but weren’t optimistic. His hunting buddy, who declined to give his full name, said most hunters fare much better when they have permission to hunt on private property.
That was the case for Travis Hartranft, 18, of Forks Township.
He bagged an eight-pointer on private property in Lower Mount Bethel Township. The buck, the fourth he’s taken since he began hunting at age 12, was shot about 1 p.m.
Hartranft took to the woods during a break in classes at Northampton Community College and made it back to campus in time for his 2 p.m. biology class, he said.
“I was in a tree stand and the deer came through the cedars and was looking up at the cedars,” he said. “I took a shot and dropped it.”
He said he had just traded places in the tree stand with his father, Rick Hartranft, about five minutes before the buck walked into his line of sight.
He called his father after shooting the buck, dressed it and dragged it to his dad’s pickup truck, he said. Then he headed off to class.
“I had a biology lab at 11, left to go hunting and was back by 2 for biology,” he said.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission says this year’s deer population is either stable or increasing in nearly all parts of the state. The estimates are based on the commission’s deer tracking programs.
State officials said about 750,000 people were expected to be hunting today as the season began, or about three-fourths of licensed hunters. In many parts of the state, about half the antlered deer season's total harvest is taken in the first day, the game commission said.
As of late this morning, business was that of a typical opening day for Stewart Kessler, owner of Kessler’s Meats on Sullivan Trail in Plainfield Township. He said hunters were trickling in to get deer processed but added he was expecting bigger crowds this afternoon.
The temperature was cool enough to allow hunters to hold off on immediately getting deer into refrigeration for food-safety purposes, Kessler said. As a result, many hunters who have killed a deer will stay out to help their buddies track and hunt.
“There’s no hurry for many of them to come in,” Kessler said. “Most of them took off a day of work and want to stay out there.”
Temperatures got into the mid-40s later in the day in parts of the Lehigh Valley, but started off in the 30s.
Kessler, whose father opened the business in the 1950s, said the first two days of the rifle season in Pennsylvania are usually the busiest of the season in terms of deer processing. He said he, like some of the hunters, believes the local deer population is slightly declining, at least on state game lands.
“I don’t think there’s the same number of deer out there that used to be out there,” he said.
Hunters in most areas can take bucks and does, though antlered deer only can be targeted in some areas through Friday. The season runs through Dec. 14 and is starting later than normal because Thanksgiving was later than usual this year.
There were few reports of accidents in the state, although a 19-year-old man on his way to hunt died before sunrise when his vehicle struck two mules on a highway south of Lancaster, local police said.
In western Pennsylvania's Venango County, officials said a hunter was shot in the leg and had to be transported to a hospital, state Emergency Management Agency spokesman Cory Angell said.
New Jersey’s rifle hunting season for deer starts next Monday.
Editor Jim Deegan and The Associated Press contributed to this report.