If Pennsylvania deer hunters buy their antlerless deer license early, they will be guaranteed the ability to get one in 19 out of the 22 Wildlife Management Units.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission is making a change to when you can buy a license to hunt antlerless deer. They are doing this to try and reduce long lines and online delays, like what happened last year on the first day of license sales.
When general hunting licenses become available for purchase on June 24th at 8 a.m., hunters can only apply for antlerless deer licenses in three specific Wildlife Management Units for the first three days.
The three Wildlife Management Units (WMUs) in Pennsylvania are 1B in the northwestern part of the state, which has 37,000 antlerless licenses. The second WMU is 2G in the northcentral part of the state, which also has 37,000 antlerless licenses. This is an increase of 2,000 licenses compared to last year. The third WMU is 3A, located on the northcentral border with New York, and it has 21,000 antlerless tags. Last year, those areas were the first to be sold out. WMU 2G was the first one and it took three days.
“During the first three days of sales, only those three WMUs will be available,” said Travis Lau, the agency’s communications director. The licenses will be sold in the order that people request them, until all of the available licenses are sold. Starting on Thursday, June 27, hunters can obtain antlerless licenses in the 19 other Wildlife Management Units (WMUs) across the state.
“If a resident hunter wants to buy a license in any of the other 19 WMUs, they can do so between 8 a.m. on June 27 and 7 a.m. on July 8. As long as they do this, they are guaranteed to get the tag for the WMU they want,” explained Lau.
The licenses will be available to people who do not live in the area starting at 8 a.m. on July 8th. During that period, the agency will only issue a specific number of antlerless licenses for each Wildlife Management Unit (WMU). Once all the licenses for a particular WMU are used up, no more will be issued.
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The sales schedule and process changes are expected to make it faster for hunters to buy licenses during the first round, reducing wait times. In June of last year, hunters were able to buy antlerless deer licenses along with their general hunting licenses for the first time. Each Wildlife Management Unit (WMU) has a certain number of licenses available for hunting antlerless deer. These licenses are usually sold out in most areas of the state.
On the first day that licenses were available for sale, many hunters in the state either waited in line or faced online delays in order to purchase their antlerless licenses. This was because they were worried that the tags would run out in their area.
According to David Stainbrook, the supervisor in charge of deer and elk, over 300,000 hunters attempted to buy licenses during the first few days they were available last year. Hunters were attempting to buy licenses to hunt antlerless deer in areas where there were many licenses available for multiple rounds of sales.
“To help reduce those issues, we have found a way to divide the first round of sales and distribute the demand over a longer period,” Stainbrook explained about the new process.
Additional doe tags
A hunter can only purchase one antlerless license per round during the first three rounds. Sales start at 8 a.m. on the first day of each round. However, there won’t be any sales between 7 a.m. and 7:59 a.m. on the first day of a round. This is to give online customers a chance to join the queue for buying. The second round of sales starts at 8 a.m. on July 22nd, and the third round starts at 8 a.m. on August 12th.
Permits for the Deer Management Assistance Program (DMAP) are also available for purchase during the third round. During the fourth round, which starts at 8 a.m. on August 26th, a hunter can buy multiple licenses for any Wildlife Management Unit (WMU) where licenses are still being sold. Hunters are not allowed to have more than six antlerless licenses at once.
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