Here's where Pa. still has antlerless deer licenses and how hunters can share venison

Round 4 of Pennsylvania’s antlerless deer license sales begins Monday morning and a program in which hunters can donate their extra venison is having a record year.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission allocated 1,186,000 antlerless deer licenses statewide for 2024-25, which is up from the 1,095,000 licenses made available last year. The agency has been selling licenses in rounds starting June 24 and there are still plenty of areas that still have plenty of licenses available.

On Tuesday morning, only nine of the 22 Wildlife Management Units (WMU) across the state were sold out, including 1A, 1B, and 2F in northwestern Pennsylvania, 2G, 3A, 3B, 3C, 3D in northcentral and northeastern Pennsylvania and 5B in southeastern Pennsylvania in York, and parts of Dauphin, Lebanon, Lancaster and Berks counties.

Other parts of the state like WMU 2C and 4A in southwestern and southcentral Pennsylvania each had more than 40,000 doe tags left.

There are also substantial numbers of antlerless licenses on the western fringe of the commonwealth where WMU 2B has 37,000 and WMU 2A has more than 14,000. WMU 2E in the westcentral part of the state has 17,000 tags left and also in central Pennsylvania, WMU 4D still has 15,000, and 4E still has more than 11,000 licenses. In southeastern Pennsylvania, hunters still have access to more than 20,000 antlerless licenses in 4B, more than 27,500 in 5C and 11,000 in 5D.

On Monday, the fourth and final round of license sales begins at 8 a.m. online at huntfish.pa.gov , many sports shops and county treasurers across the state. Hunters can have six antlerless licenses at one time. Each resident antlerless deer license costs $6.97.

The availability of extra antlerless deer licenses gives hunters options on where they hunt throughout the variety of hunting seasons including archery, rifle and muzzleloaders. Depending on where you hunt, there are deer hunting opportunities between the end of September and Jan. 25.

How license allocations are determined

“Whether the allocation goes up or down in a given year is largely reflective of a couple of things, but deer population is one of them. Also, CWD (Chronic Wasting Disease) risk, whether that’s directly within a WMU where the disease is known to exist or in the cases of the DMAP (Deer Management Assistance Program) unit that we created last year that was in an area around a new (CWD deer) positive is sort of a layer of protection,” said Travis Lau, communications director for the Game Commission.

In areas where CWD is a concern, the agency is trying to reduce the number of deer to lower the chances of the disease spreading to other parts of the state.

There are also social impacts with deer that the PGC addresses as well.

“Whether they be agricultural crop damage, when you have deer populations that are excessively high or maybe deer populations that are too high for an area that's densely inhabited by people, you can have higher incidents of deer/vehicle collisions,” he said.

The agency looks to create a balance of what’s good for the habitat as well as the human population.

“How much agricultural crop damage are farmers willing to accept? How many roadkills are people in areas of the state where there are higher incidents because there are high deer populations/reduced hunting opportunities and a lot of people there? How many are they willing to endure? There are a lot of things at play and it all comes together in creating that allocation,” Lau said.

Hunters Sharing the Harvest

For those who enjoy hunting but don’t have a need for a lot of venison, there are opportunities to share their success with others.

“Hunters Sharing the Harvest (HSH) is a good resource for hunters who maybe don’t want their deer or have an additional tag they could fill, but maybe they don’t have room enough in their freezer to take on another deer. That’s a good option because that program does a lot of good for a lot of people,” Lau said.

Hunters Sharing the Harvest is a program where hunters can drop off their deer at one of about 100 deer processors across the state and the meat is shared with people in need. The list of processors can be found on the HSH’s website, sharedeer.org .

“It’s another record year; it’s amazing. Pennsylvania hunters just keep blowing us away every year with how they respond to this program,” Randy Ferguson, executive director of Hunters Sharing the Harvest, said about the 2023-24 hunting year.

The nonprofit organization received 261,672 pounds of meat last year from 6,905 deer and six elk in Pennsylvania.

Some of the elk were donated by hunters and others were hit by vehicles and collection efforts were organized by state game wardens. “It’s pretty rare, although I will say it seems like we usually have one, two, maybe three elk, but this is the first time we’ve ever had that many come through,” Ferguson said.

HSH is always looking for more butchers and deer processors to participate in the program.

“The last couple of years, knock on wood, we’ve had a net gain in processors each year. Last year, it was a pretty good year. We added somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 processors last year and we only lost one or two, like to retirement, one was health-related,” he said.

There are several counties that don’t have a partnering butcher shop with HSH that Ferguson is trying to fill.

“Right now, we don’t have anybody in Warren. We don’t have any in Potter County,” he said. In Forest County, they have a processor that’s on the border in Clarion County.

“We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 12 counties at least around the state where we need processors,” he said.

In some parts of the state, like Butler and Lancaster counties, the organization has multiple processors.

“We want to make sure we have a processor in every county and we want to have somebody within a reasonable driving distance of every hunter,” Ferguson said.

Hunters donate their deer free of charge and the processor converts the venison into packages of ground hamburger for local food banks, pantries and charitable food programs. Ferguson said an average-sized deer will provide about 200 3-ounce servings of low-fat venison.

More: Hunters share their tips for bagging deer on state game lands

HSH pays the processors for their efforts with money raised through donations, foundation grants and funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and the Game Commission.

With the number of deer being donated each year growing, Ferguson said they are placing more efforts on fundraising to help cover the costs. “Not only are hunters, in general, becoming more aware of our program and wanting to participate by taking advantage of the additional antlerless tags they can get, but things like crop damage deer are becoming a much bigger factor in our operations every year and that has kind of driven our costs up quite a bit,” he said.

In the 2023-24 hunting year, the number of crop-damage deer kills that were turned into HSH doubled from the year before to almost 1,300 deer. “That’s a concern for us,” Ferguson said about the additional costs to cover processing the deer. In the past, the operation was more hunter-based donations.

Overall, the program serves a variety of needs in the state for hunters, the deer population and those who are going through a difficult financial time.

“You get the social service side of things, you get the hunters’ enjoyment of additional days in the woods hunting and doing what they love, and then you get the fact that you’re also helping in the biology standpoint of managing the herd across the state,” Ferguson said.

For more details on the HSH program, visit sharedeer.org online.

Brian Whipkey is the outdoors columnist for USA TODAY Network sites in Pennsylvania. Contact him at bwhipkey@gannett.com and sign up for our weekly Go Outdoors PA newsletter email on this website's homepage under your login name. Follow him on Facebook @whipkeyoutdoors .

This article originally appeared on The Daily American: Here's where Pa. still has antlerless deer licenses and how hunters can share venison