Backyard bucks
Suburban hunting requires patience and social skills
Welcome, hunters, to Wildlife Management Unit 2B — 1,363 square miles of neighborhoods that span most of Allegheny County and the fringes of adjacent counties.
Feral farmland and second-growth forests make hunting easier in the most northern, western and southern areas. But most of the land is a populated patchwork of posted and unposted properties lush with green yards, vegetable and flower gardens, fruit trees and protective cover where the most threatening predator of deer rolls on four wheels.
Urban sprawl creates the perfect habitat for whitetailed deer, offering greater food availability than the tall ancient conifer landscapes originally provided by nature. Females breed prolifically and it’s not uncommon to find big, beefy deer that live six, seven years or longer. Some die of old age. Some of the bucks carry some of the thickest, healthiest racks in Pennsylvania.
Hunters in some areas find it easy to hunt among the houses. But more often, safe and successful suburban hunting is a challenge requiring patience, tolerance and social skills that aren’t as necessary in wilder places.
In a YouTube video posted by First Lite, a hunting clothing manufacturer, a hunter describes his 10 years of hunting in the densely populated Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
“The absolute greatest thing in the world is being able to hunt this many properties this close to home,” said Taylor Chamberlin in the 12½-minute film “In City Limits.”
“I’ve hunted on people’s decks before, in tree forts and swing sets — anything the deer are used to.”
Suburban landowners are sometimes pleasantly surprised, he said, when someone not dressed in camouflage or blaze orange knocks on the door and politely requests permission to hunt on their land. To access 100 acres on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, Mr. Chamberlin needs about 300 written landowner permissions. The film opens and closes as he’s requesting permission to retrieve a deer from a backyard.
“When you’re hunting on small tracts of land, sometimes the deer will not expire on a property where you have permission to be,” he said. “When that happens … I always go back to my car, put on my regular clothing … and go around to the person’s house and ask permission. Walking up that driveway, I get butterflies in my stomach [like] when there’s a deer under you because you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Legal hunting occurs in places within Pittsburgh’s city limits. It’s mostly archery and, for the record, the Game Commission and police say the city has never experienced a hunting-related shooting incident. The early antlered and antlerless archery season ends Sunday, except in 2B and the wildlife management units spanning Philadelphia, where the conservation hunt continues through Nov. 24.
David D. Bubash Jr. of West Deer has hunted in the Shaler area with bows and slug guns for 24 years, but he got the full suburban hunting experience when his arrow didn’t drop a deer on Oct. 13.
“When I shot the 10-point in Shaler last month, the deer ran into different yards as my wife and I were tracking it. I went door to door asking permission to access their properties to retrieve my deer,” he said.
“One of the homeowners was completely against me going into their yard, so I simply went to the next house. … End result, we jumped the buck multiple times and tracked it into Fawcett Fields.”
No hunting is permitted in the township park that includes soccer fields, a hiking trail and in the spring a children’s fishing area.
“I called the Shaler Police Department for some assistance since I knew I wouldn’t be able to shoot the animal in the park,” said Mr. Bubash. “Officer Joshua Watkins arrived and was able to put down the deer after four hours of tracking the buck for 3 miles.”
Robbie Petrick of Carnegie harvested an 8-point in North Fayette with a 20-yard archery shot at 6:15 p.m. Oct. 5. It was his third early archery buck taken in the ‘burbs.
“In a lot of cases, urban deer do the work for you since you often don’t have to cover as much ground to find the areas they are frequenting,” he said. “From a sheer volume standpoint, your odds of finding frequently used areas go up in suburbia just because these deer use whatever cover is available to them.”
In those areas, deer are acclimated to the sights, sounds and scents of an urban environment, including people.
“This doesn’t mean that they are any easier to fool into walking within bow range. Scent control, wind direction and proper stand positioning are still extremely important to give yourself the most opportunities,” said Mr. Petrick.
State hunting laws supercede municipal firearm discharge ordinances, although the unenforceable rules remain on the books in some Allegheny County communities. Wildlife management agencies struggle to control human-deer conflicts in urban areas, where residents may be fearful of bullets, bolts and arrows, or just unwilling to sanction the killing of deer. Urban hunters are doing the community a favor, whether they know it or not, by reducing the local doe population before harvesting a buck.
The state Game Commission recently approved a measure that will strengthen the “public hunting” requirement necessary beforemunicipalities are granted deer control permits. There vision defines public hunting as hunting available to the generalpublic that “shall not include hunting opportunity that is afforded to an individual, or class of individuals, solely by virtue of their public employment.”
The clarification could provide more opportunity for suburban hunters.