Huh??? When it's super thick, right after clearcutting or whatever, that's when there's the most food per acre. After it turns into pole woods, not so much.
I've talked to Dr. Alt, and I agree with him. The biggest problem in PA is that people refused to shoot does, and they overpopulated, and when they overpopulated, they ate all the acorns, saplings and small trees down to nothing. Now those areas are choked with ferns, so even if the acorns don't get all ate up, there's no light for them to grow. As a result, those old forests lost their "carrying capacity" to support deer, and they won't regenerate, and they'll basically get old and die, and then have to start over from scratch. In other words, the reason deer populations crashed in many parts of PA is because they were allowed to get way too overpopulated, and as a result, the over-abundant deer ate themselves out of house and home, and permanently changed the habitat for the worse, so that now, even if you imported new deer into those fern covered forests, there wouldn't be a fu$king thing for them to eat. Deer don't eat ferns. And there ain't much nutrition gnawing lichens off boulders.
This has happened in PA several times since the late 1800s. Deer were so abundant around Philly back in the early 1900s that the Game Commission had to hire sharpshooters to kill them off. The only way to tame the boom-and-bust cycle is to prevent the deer from overpopulating, and the only way to do that is to kill does. That's what we do here in VA. Our season is seven weeks, and we can take four deer but no more than one buck. And we have very healthy populations of deer.
