Part of the problem Dr. Alt was blamed for (while heading deer management for the Pennsylvania Game Commission) was that hunters in the Northern Tier and Big Woods counties (bounded, roughly, by the New York line, I-81, I-80 and I-79) were used to going to their camps and sitting on the same stump year after year. While they were doing so, the woods grew up around them and, after 40 years or so, there was very little edge cover/vegetation for the deer to eat. A lot of that land was state forest or state park land and not being logged off at all. I could take you to some of my old stomping grounds in Pike County where the browse line is so sharp you could cut yourself on it, and the only vegetation on the forest floor are inedible ferns and mushrooms on decomposing logs.
In any event, the hunters in those counties, who'd been accustomed to huge numbers of deer (and got fat and lazy about it), were seeing none because there was no habitat to support them.
On the other hand, there now are deer - many, many deer - in leafy suburbs south of I-80 and east of I-81 and in the south-central parts of the state - the agricultural parts. When I was a kid growing up there, there were no deer in those parts. "You want to hunt deer, you go to Potter County", was the watchword. I saw my first deer not in the big woods up north in 1980. Now, they're everywhere. So much so that, for a while, the City of Philadelphia allowed hunting in Fairmount Park to cut down on the deer damage. Maybe they still do - I dunno.
The problem is, of course, that a lot of those deer that are there, are in unhuntable areas (too close to houses) or places where the stump-sitting crew don't bother to get to know the landowner or scout.
You want the Alt solution to your deer problems? Let the forests grow to climax and see how they disappear.
It will be interesting to see, though, how things pan out now that a lot of those state lands up north have been opened by the frackers with new roads and new cuttings. That, and the Game Commission has been doing cutting to create "early successional habitat" on their Game Lands.
I wasn't aware Alt had been threatened over deer management. The only threats to wildlife biologists I've heard about have been by HSUS-adherents to our bear biologists last year in the runup to the referendum we had here (on bait, hounds and traps for bears). That, and some years ago to the NJ bear biologist (whose vehicle was rigged with a dud bomb) in connection (temporal, at least) with their bear hunt. Threatening biologists is a dimwit move, no matter who's doing it.
