Deer Hunting

For self-described animal lover Lynne Ciampoli, the deer grazing in the fields of her neighborhood bordering Ridley Creek State Park are "beautiful and fascinating" visions to watch. But the 83-year-old resident of White Horse Village also knows what damage deer can do. "When you hear of people hitting deer and being injured, and cars sustaining damage . . . something has to be done," said Ciampoli, whose daughter and son have both had collisions with deer. To that end, park officials this week announced that archers who pledge to adhere to Pennsylvania Game Commission rules can begin hunting in selected portions of the Delaware County park from Sept.

Dick James, executive director of the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, questions (Aug. 10) my assertion that a plan is being devised to open our city parks to gun nuts and Tonto freaks. The Pennsylvania Game Commission, without public input, has passed Chapter 147, sub-chapter R, creating "a permit which would be issued to municipalities and allow the taking of deer regardless of age or sex at times outside of the established hunting seasons. " This means 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, indeed "allow(ing)

Concerned that a ravenous deer population is destroying Pennsylvania forests, a group of scientists says the state Game Commission is politically incapable of pursuing the best solution for keeping the animals under control: allowing more hunting. They say that's because the commission is funded mostly by hunting-related taxes and fees, and the agency caves in to pressure from hunters - many of whom, ironically, do not want the state to allow them to kill more deer. The scientists' findings are contained in a 340-page report, to be released today, that was commissioned by a coalition of conservation groups, including a few that represent hunters.

Lock Haven, Pa., Nov. 16 - More than 1,000 hunters were in Clinton County in quest of deer. A tracking snow made conditions ideal for the opening of the season. A spiked buck was killed on Sugar Run within two miles of this city by Elmer Phillips and (an) eight-prong buck was killed at Flat Rock . . . and two in Bruch Valley. Most of the deer haunts are far from telegraph and telephone, hence meager information is obtainable. - Harrisburg Telegraph, Nov. 16, 1910 There isn't a sportsman who hasn't wondered what it would have been like to hunt deer when there were fewer hunters, when the big-woods counties of north-central Pennsylvania enjoyed few paved roads and were far from civilization, and when dispatches about successful hunts were transmitted by dots and dashes along a wire.

This winter, for the first time in its history, the shots of hunters will echo through the woods of Warwick County Park for three days in an attempt to tame the region's out-of-control deer population. "County parks, particularly Warwick, are often a refuge for deer," Parks Director Bill Mineo said at Thursday's county commissioners meeting. "That refuge will no longer be available. " The commissioners Thursday approved a resolution authorizing three nonconsecutive days of antlerless-deer hunting at Warwick, which is in the northern part of the county, and at Nottingham County Park, where hunting has been allowed for years.

Jeff Bringhurst has never hunted a day in his life, but for him deer season has added meaning. It is called work. Bringhurst, 44, is a butcher, and, with New Jersey's six-day firearm season for deer starting today, he and the 18 or so workers at Bringhurst Meats in this Camden County township's Tansboro section will handle hundreds of deer carcasses in the days ahead. They will weigh them; tag them; skin them; cut them into roasts, steaks and chops; and turn much of the meat into sausages.

While most area students had Thursday and Friday off for the Thanksgiving holiday, others in Bucks, Montgomery and neighboring counties are enjoying a five-day weekend that continues through today because of a long-standing tradition that had nothing to do with turkeys. Their schools are closed today for the first day of the deer-hunting season. Hundreds of boys and girls will follow their fathers and mothers into the thickets and brambles of these counties, in pursuit of dinner - as in venison.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission's plans to issue antlerless deer licenses this fall in Philadelphia may be little more than wishful thinking because hunting will be prohibited at all public parks. The commission last week announced that it would issue 500 archery-only licenses in the city for hunting does and fawns. It would be the first such issuance since the commission began granting antlerless deer licenses in 1923. But there will be few places in which to hunt. Hunting will not be permitted this year - and never has been permitted - on the 8,700 acres of public property controlled by the Fairmount Park Commission, said commission spokesman Dick Nicolae.

Five months after it was put up, neighbors still view the fence surrounding Tristram Colket's estate as a chain-link eyesore on the rolling, verdant hills that straddle the Willistown-Easttown border. They will probably always view it that way, said Phillip Tordella, who lives across White Horse Road from the Colkets' 200-acre Rock Hill Farm. "I think the only thing that unites the people in the neighborhood is that they hate the fence. " A conglomeration of 8-inch-thick wood pilings and 3-inch triangular mesh standing 9 feet tall, the fence first appeared last summer as a symbol of the exploding deer population in the Philadelphia suburbs.

THE RAZZIES are moving to April. April first, to be exact. The spoof on the Academy Awards picks the year's worst films. The Razzies used to announce contenders the night before the Oscar nominations, which are coming tomorrow. But Razzies founder John Wilson announced yesterday that nominations this season will be released Feb. 25, the eve of the Oscar ceremony. Winners will be announced on April 1. Wilson says Razzies organizers have long wanted to have their awards coincide with April Fool's Day. A news release announcing the change also notes that it will give the 600 Razzies voters "additional time to see the dreck they will eventually nominate.

TODAY IS Pennsylvania's only unofficial holiday - the opening of deer season. This year, it arrives amid a clash between two components of state culture: religious roots and hunting tradition. Founded on religious freedoms, our state still tops the national average in weekly churchgoers; and it has 950,000 licensed hunters, second only to Texas. Not suggesting that God and guns don't mix. But they're in the mix in a statewide battle in which you'd think guns hold an edge.

Noting that a plan to radically thin the deer herd at Gettysburg National Military Park has withstood a court challenge, the U.S. Justice Department is asking a federal appeals court to reject a request to stop a similar operation at Valley Forge National Historical Park. The Revolutionary War site is "overrun" with white-tailed deer, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Bernstein said in a petition filed Tuesday in Philadelphia. And contrary to the contentions of animal-rights activists, the petition said, park officials settled on a strategy of culling the herd by mass shootings only after an exhaustive public process that produced a written record of "15,000 pages.

It sounded, at first, like an innocent hunting accident: A Bucks County hunter who had just bagged a buck caught a stray bullet and died on the first day of hunting season last month. But as an investigation unfolded into the Nov. 29 death of hunter Barry Groh, things suddenly seemed more sinister: The apparent shooter is a lawyer who allegedly used a high-powered rifle illegal for deer hunting in Bucks County, and this wasn't his first involvement in bloodshed. In 1993, as lawyer David Michael Manilla and a friend hunted pheasants, a shot hit another hunter in the neck, narrowly missing an artery.

NEAR CROSS FORK, Pa. - A half-century after that first youthful kill, the deer hunter trudged once more up a familiar old trail. The lonely, wooded slopes above Beech Bottom Run lay dusted with snow Saturday afternoon as the hunter, rifle over his shoulder, scanned them for wild turkey and a defining piece of his past. At the top of the mile-long climb rose a stand of soaring, old-growth hemlocks, their trunks up to three feet wide, somehow spared from the ravenous loggers of the 1890s.

At least two of her legs were broken, but she showed no fear as I drove by. Only minutes earlier, having been struck by a passing car, the doe now showed more resignation than pain, as she surveyed passing traffic from the shoulder of Providence Road. When I read of planned "lethal reductions" and the expected protests of animal-rights groups ("Valley Forge Park schedules deer shoots," Tuesday), I remembered that doe. I know many more deer will die on our highways as we struggle with our own inability to confront emotional problems that blind our understanding of the population explosion we've created.

Officials at Valley Forge National Historical Park said today that they'll begin shooting deer there next month, moving ahead with a culling plan that was delayed for a year. The "lethal reduction" is designed to drastically trim a herd that park managers say has grown big and destructive. During shootings to be held during each of the next four years, the deer population will be reduced from its current 241 per square mile to about 35 per square mile, officials said. Animal-rights activists have staunchly opposed the killings, which they say are harmful, unnecessary, and dangerous to people living around the park.

Hoping to control the number of deer, Montgomery County officials said Thursday that they will hold a bow hunt Nov. 8 for the animals in Lorimer Park, Abington. Hunters must use conventional archery equipment or crossbows, and shoot from tree stands, said officials of the county's parks department. Lorimer Park and the Pennypack Trail will be off limits to all others that day. The state's Game Commission will supervise. Bucks and does are fair game, but hunters must have a special doe tag to participate.

For self-described animal lover Lynne Ciampoli, the deer grazing in the fields of her neighborhood bordering Ridley Creek State Park are "beautiful and fascinating" visions to watch. But the 83-year-old resident of White Horse Village also knows what damage deer can do. "When you hear of people hitting deer and being injured, and cars sustaining damage . . . something has to be done," said Ciampoli, whose daughter and son have both had collisions with deer. To that end, park officials this week announced that archers who pledge to adhere to Pennsylvania Game Commission rules can begin hunting in selected portions of the Delaware County park from Sept.