Photo by Marc Murrell.

At Pennsylvania Game & Fish, we're about a lot more than numbers. We care about where you can find deer and where you can hunt them on public land -- for free, whenever you have the time to go. We feature places where any serious bowhunter can have a great adventure without traveling out of state or spending a fortune.

Pennsylvania's top archery deer counties could be Allegheny, Berks, Westmoreland and York, which typically lead the state with more than 1,000 bucks per county harvested by bowhunters each year.

These are the top four counties for bucks harvested by bowhunters on average during the three most recent years when the Pennsylvania Game Commission released bowhunter deer harvests by county (from 2001-'03). Since the 2003 seasons, archery deer harvests have been reported only by wildlife management units.

With rare exceptions, however, hunters need permission to hunt on private land in any of these counties. All those high numbers really indicate areas where there are more bowhunters. They are all urban-suburban areas with lots of people. They get to hunt there, but you and I may not.

AND THE WINNER IS . . .
Forest County could appear to be marginal for archery-hunting, if numbers told the entire story. For those same years, the average bowhunter harvest was just 209 bucks per year. That ranked way down the list.

But this doesn't tell the true story. If you examine a state archery deer harvest map, you should observe that bowhunter harvests go down as you move further away from the larger metropolitan areas. It's all about the number of bowhunters, not about the number of deer, nor even about the quality of the hunt. Statistics say that bowhunters tend to hunt close to home, and there aren't many bowhunters living in Forest County.

During the 2004-'05 seasons, just 422 licenses were sold in Forest County, versus 15,408 in Allegheny County. Of course, where licenses are sold doesn't necessarily indicate where hunters spent their time. Still, this gives a better indication of the situation than do harvest figures alone.

In Allegheny County, bowhunters harvest roughly 0.166 bucks per each archery license sold, whereas in Forest County the rate is about 0.50 bucks per license sold. This makes bowhunting three times more likely to be successful in Forest County than in the county with the greatest harvest totals.

This sort of kitchen-table figuring is far from scientific, but you get the idea. Forest County is a great place for a bowhunting adventure, however, and here are some more substantial reasons.

ROOM TO ROAM
One of our smallest counties, Forest County covers 275,840 acres. A large share of it is public land. But, within Forest County are 118,615 acres of Allegheny National Forest, roughly 1,500 acres of Cook Forest State Park, 2,268 acres of state forestland and 6,177 acres of state game lands. That's about 128,560 acres of public land, or 47 percent of the total area for this small county. This fact alone makes Forest County a perfect destination for bowhunters.

Need more room? A lot of private land is open to public hunting. Collins Pine Company-Kane Hardwoods keeps about 55,400 acres open to hunters. This figure brings the land in the county open to public hunting up to 67 percent.