A divided Game Commission sets new opening day for Pennsylvania’s deer season

Deer hunting season in Pennsylvania will be starting on a Saturday rather than a Monday beginning next season.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission board voted 5-3 Tuesday to move opening day of deer rifle season to the first Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Rifle season for hunting deer in Pennsylvania has kicked off the Monday after Thanksgiving since 1963. The change expands the firearms season to 13 days, including three Saturdays rather than two.

Supporters hope a Saturday opening will bring back people struggling to find time to hunt and help high school and college hunters who don’t get opening day off from school.

Opponents said the change would interfere with hunting camp traditions and complicate travel during the Thanksgiving weekend.

The board gave preliminary approval to the idea in January. The agency heard from hunters who said they can no longer get off work on opening day of hunting, Game Commission spokesman Travis Lau told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Although many schools in rural areas close for the occasion, that trend is shrinking, he said earlier this year.

“The goal is to get more people in the woods,” Lau told the Inquirer then.

It wasn’t immediately certain Tuesday whether the scheduling change will affect school calendars in Centre County, where districts typically have given students extra time off when deer hunting begins. Philipsburg-Osceola is among the districts that traditionally have not held classes on the first two days of the season, incorporating that Monday and Tuesday into a Thanksgiving break, Superintendent Gregg Paladina said.

“Maybe we don’t have to have two days off for the first day of deer season” anymore, he said. “Maybe it’s just one. Since (the opener now) is Saturday, it could be none. It’s going to depend on long-standing traditions in the community — and I know many of our people go away to hunting camps. So we may end up having the Monday off.”

The matter will “require some discussion among some of the stakeholders,” Paladina added.

In the State College district, too, spokesman Chris Rosenblum said deer season’s new start date could influence academic calendars. School boards generally hold decision-making power over the calendars.

“Our calendar for the next school year is set, with no school on the Monday after Thanksgiving, but the change will allow us to evaluate that day in a new light moving forward,” Rosenblum said via email. “At this point, the 2019-2020 calendar will remain the same, and nothing has been decided for 2020-2021 and beyond.”

The shift in the hunting schedule won’t affect the Bellefonte schools’ 2019-2020 calendar, either, according to that district. The Bald Eagle and Penns Valley districts didn’t immediately comment.

Hunting-license sales in Pennsylvania peaked in 1982 at 1.1 million and have declined consistently since then, according to the Inquirer. The state sold just under 900,000 licenses last year, the newspaper reported.

Their cost runs $20.90 for many adult residents and less than half that for youth. License purchases in 2017 brought in $35.3 million to the commission, which uses more than 60 percent of its budget for wildlife habitat management and wildlife protection, according to the agency’s annual report.

Also Tuesday, the commission board shortened to two days the late-November turkey seasons, a move designed to accommodate the Saturday opener for firearms deer season, according to the agency. Board members also approved expanding the mid-October muzzleloader and special-firearms deer seasons to include bears statewide, and increased — to two weeks — the length of the statewide archery bear season, among other adjustments.

A separate provision — a pending state bill — would allow the Game Commission to introduce hunting on Sundays. To take effect, that change would require approval by the Senate, the House and Gov. Tom Wolf. The legislation was referred last month to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The Philadelphia Inquirer and CDT staff contributed.

This story was originally published April 9, 2019 at 12:12 PM.