Gator

I posted comments this morning. Here's what I said, if anybody's interested. Thank you for the opportunity to comment. I am 48 years old and a landowner, with ~42 acres adjacent to Northampton Park in Monroe County. I would like to convey my sense of disappointment this past season, my first owning the property, when I found out that I would not be able to hunt for several large bucks that I’d patterned over the summer until after October 15th. This put quite a damper on my first season there. I always shoot doe; I am a Professor of Medicine at the University of Rochester and my graduate students are always hungry! However, I do not shoot doe when it’s 70F out. In general, I harvest them later in the gun season and during muzzleloader season to allow the cool temperatures to do their work. Hence, I wasn’t in the woods the first two weeks of season. I firmly believe based upon interactions with many, many other bowhunters that the new regulation was not only ineffective, it was counterproductive and alienated your stakeholders. Moreover, I’m not sure that I understand how a small fraction of the hunting community such as bowhunters is expected to make enough of a dent in the doe population to be considered an effective management tool. I would like to clearly state my opinion that this rule should be rescinded. I would also like to provide some input from the perspective of a landowner near a high density deer area that doesn’t allow hunting. My neighbors and I (there are five groups in total that say in touch who own large parcels near Northampton) all commented on the lack of doe this year. Their numbers were so low that I asked my friends hunting on my property NOT to shoot doe, just so the bucks would have a couple to chase during the rut. This is in dramatic contrast to other areas I hunted where the numbers were somewhat lower than previous years, but not virtually non-existing. I came to find out that a local fruit farmer had shot at last count 73 doe on nuisance permits. Yes, 73 doe means he had a deer problem, I suspect. But the local impact was devastating. There needs to be reins on how many permits are distributed in a small area, even an area that’s considered to be high density. Again, my expectations as a first year landowner came to a crushing halt. My neighbors uniformly mirrored my opinion…there were just no doe around. Nuisance permits need to be more carefully handled and limits on local distribution need to be in place. Finally, although I understand the need for management tools, putting muzzleloader season in the middle of bow season is a very bad idea. Rifles and guys in trees wearing camo do not mix well. We don’t need another “opening day†in the woods to kick the deer into hiding. I know that everyone I speak to would like to harvest an extra doe for themselves or one of their co-workers. It’s not that they don’t have the tags. It’s not that they don’t have the time. They just don’t have the opportunity. For whatever reasons (I favor a lack of access and the prevalence of leasing), the guys I know either harvest all the doe that they want if they’re lucky enough to have spots or they simply don’t see deer (generally if they’re limited in where they can hunt and they burn that spot). Muzzleloader season during bow might change when the deer are harvested, but I sincerely feel that it won’t change overall harvest numbers. Finally, even if this regulation should come to pass, there will be no muzzleloader hunting on my land. We enjoy bow too much and we spend too much money in taxes to have our passion ruined in this way.

That's the first report I've heard from Oneida. The talk on Iceshanty is that only Big Bay is safe. I'm sure that's changing constantly as this winter weather (finally!!) keeps up, but I know there was a bunch of snow there recently, too, and there's probably only limited safe access. I guess it's good to know somebody is getting them...

"Please tell me how those fish returned back to that ditch if there were no fish present for upwards of 5 years?" The same way my wife can get lost even when she's using a GPS

Great discussion so far. Nobody can argue with an ounce of prevention! I'm wondering how they're going to enforce the law, but regardless of enforcement, it's a valid point that Joe Sportsman might have no idea the law even exists without some publicity. While in general I disagree with legislating common sense....what do they say about common sense not being so common? Maybe it takes some uproar to plant the idea in peoples' heads that this is serious stuff. Even if the only outcome of these proposed changes is simply to rile people up, perhaps that's a good thing? The more awareness there is as to the severity of the issue, the better off we all are. I spend time wondering what the next geographically impaired screw up is going to be, and I sure don't want to be that guy who messes up somebody else's favorite fishing hole because they don't know or care enough to pay attention to what they're inadvertently introducing into a naive system. As for zebra mussels...I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemy.

So, in case you didn't realize from my post above, I'm a gene jockey and I do this stuff for a living. The basic conceptual issue with engineering an "Achilles heel" into an organism is that it has to provide a selective advantage to be successfully spread through the population. If your genetic modification creates a weakness, then offspring will be disadvantaged and it won't spread. There are ways to do this, but it's not a simple thing and potential that DNA will jump between species (which is known to occur, albeit at a rate best measured in millennia) makes it imperative to be cautious. Keep in mind, this comes from a true believer.

I like the way you think!! I do get concerned about unanticipated consequences though. You can see that in some of the biological control measures they've brought in to combat invasives that have on their own become problems. The best intentions...kudzu was introduced by the Corps of Engineers as means of bank stabilization almost a century ago. Now it's eaten the South. I seem to recall reading about how they engineered mosquitoes with latent sterility and wanted to release them on one of the Florida Keys. The residents were all for it, until they heard that the new control measures involved Frankensquito I think that the best approach might be to engineer a reduced tolerance for environments outside of a defined niche. Key in on things like salt. We understand that process fairly well and small tweaks might work.

We've done the LG thing, and they're militant about it. Of course, they also have a huge problem with an invasive aquatic plant. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I mean, how do you get some of this stuff in farm ponds? Nobody launches their boat... I'm a big proponent of protecting our waterways. But I hate rules that aren't based on evidence. They may sound good, but do they really work? The lack of certain invasives in some waterways may be due to a lack of sufficient habitat or an appropriate reproductive niche. Or maybe there's been some measure of success. I hate to think that we're powerless to stop this stuff, but then I look around. Crap, now I'm depressed. Great way to start a week. Got to go break some bulbs!!

Got to agree with Skipper19. The regulations will place an undue burden on the average Joe, but stuff's going to find its way in somehow anyway. If you're talking about an invasive that's half a world away, then we're not the ones you have to regulate. Once it's here though, birds, amphibians, and yes, trailers, are going to inevitably spread it. The only way it won't show is if the environment isn't right for its growth of it's out-competed by something else. Sad, but Nature finds a way, right? (Good line from Jurassic Park). The proposed regs might slow the spread of a few things, yeah. Like a BandAid when you're hemorrhaging. I'm a bit concerned that it's a knee jerk reaction, not founded on reality but instead perception and politics. Where's the science behind their proposal? The governor instructed DEC to come up with a plan to enforce his mandate "reasonable precautions such as removal of any visible plant or animal matter, washing, draining or drying ... have been taken." prior to launching. So DEC came up with this. Will it even work? I have to use 140F water, unless it's not available, then I get to use cold water? Huh? How is that enforceable? And if I don't want to wash my boat, I can just leave it to dry for five days? Again, huh? Where's the evidence that any of this is effective? I can understand removing visible plant material; that's just common sense. The rest of it seems like fluff. My bet is that it gives DEC license to write a ticket for just about anything they deem inappropriate. And don't even get me started on non-aquatic invasives...there doesn't seem to be a tree that's not being decimated by some bug, blight, or rust, and Swallowort is like a miniature Kudzu. We are fighting a losing battle.

Nope, no sound. I figure the wife got to my computer and did something...she just about s**ts herself every year the first time.