Trending
The archery deer season in Pennsylvania opens this weekend at a half hour before sunrise on Saturday and continues through Friday, Nov. 20.
The winter archery deer season will then commence the day after Christmas and continue through Jan. 24 for those die-hard bowhunters who still have an unfilled deer tag.
Archery hunting for deer has now become on of Pennsylvania's most popular hunting events, with more than 350,000 archers heading to the woods each year to bag a deer with a bow and arrow. And many of them do just that.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission's deer harvest estimates for the 2025-26 hunting seasons were a total of 505,600 deer, with 185,310 of them antlered and 320,290 antlerless. Of those totals, archers harvested 182,190 deer, 94,290 of them antlered and 87,900 antlerless.
Of course, bowhunting hasn't always been such a major part of the Pennsylvania hunting experience. It developed gradually from meager beginnings more than 75 years ago.
The bow and arrow was first legalized for hunting in Pennsylvania in 1929. Apparently, there were enough archery enthusiasts back then so that support grew for having a special archery deer season during the 1940s. That support resulted in Pennsylvania's first archery season, which was held in 1951.
To participate in that inaugural event, a hunter needed to buy a $2 archery license in addition to the regular hunting license. Only bucks were legal during that first campaign, and 5,542 hunters bought an archery license to be a part of it. Just 33 of them, however, reported taking a buck. That's a rather dismal success rate of barely more than one-half of one percent but probably not too surprising considering most of those participating were first-time bowhunters using recurve and longbows.
Bowhunting success rates didn't improve immediately. In 1952, sales of archery licenses increased to 8,446 but the archery harvest decreased to only 24 bucks.
Despite what seemed to be skimpy odds for success in those early days, interest in the new archery season steadily grew in the succeeding years as did the deer harvests. The archery harvest rose to 224 bucks in 1956.
One big boost came in 1957 when bowhunters were permitted to take either a buck or a doe during the archery season. The archery season harvest that year jumped to 1,358 deer, which included 376 bucks, and was the first time that the archery deer harvest exceeded one percent of the total deer harvest.
As bowhunters gained experience, their productivity increased markedly. Better bows and other archery equipment continued to appear on the market, and archery hunting continued to gain popularity among the hunting community.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission responded to the increasing participation by offering expanded opportunities whenever possible. The winter archery season was first established in some limited areas of the state in 1964 and was then expanded statewide in 1967.
Some younger hunters I've spoken with tend to forget that until 1988, a hunter could take only one deer a year in Pennsylvania. Archery hunters had always had the privilege of being permitted to take a buck or a doe during the archery season.
Many bowhunters, however, routinely passed on easy opportunities to take a doe, which would end their deer season and forfeit the chance of bagging a buck that year. In 1988, the longstanding rule of "one deer a tear" was changed to permit hunters with a doe license to legally harvest both a buck and a doe in the same year. Shortly thereafter, another change allowed an individual hunter to purchase multiple doe licenses from counties that still had licenses available after a specified date (Back then, doe licenses were allocated by county, not WMUs, which weren't created until years later). That allowed a bowhunter the chance to harvest a doe in the early archery season and still be able to hunt for a buck the rest of the deer season.
One of the greatest incentives to the expansion of archery hunting in Pennsylvania came in 1973 when compound bows were legalized for hunting. Compound bows were developed in 1966. I won't pretend to understand the principles of physics that explain how they work other than to say a series of cams and pulleys enables a compound bow to shoot faster and flatter than a conventional bow.
A compound bow also experiences what is known as "let-off," which means the shooter can hold the string at full draw with much less strength than a comparable conventional bow. These and other attributes made a compound bow a most desirable implement for hunting, but Pennsylvania's regulations allowed only recurve and longbows without any mechanical enhancements. That all changed in 1973 when the regulations were changed to allow compound bows.
I experienced the mass transition firsthand when I began working for a major sporting goods retailer in 1974. In short, we could sell any compound bows just about as fast as we could receive them, while we had to mark down our small existing stock of recurves to near giveaway prices just to clear them out.
What I found even more remarkable was the prevailing negative attitude toward compound bows by many experienced bowhunters at the time. That will put a bunch of idiots in the woods; they will wound a bunch of deer and never find them; compounds aren't "real" bows; and many other disparaging comments were frequently expressed by users of conventional bows. Despite that initial negativity regarding them, compounds soon became the weapon of choice for Pennsylvania bowhunters.
A similar situation occurred in the early 2000s when some hunters began to promote the idea of permitting crossbows for hunting in Pennsylvania. I was the editor of an outdoor magazine back then, and one month I wrote a short editorial expressing support for allowing crossbows. That piece generated more letters and email than anything else I've ever written before or since. And almost every one of them heartily disagreed with me. What I found most interesting was almost every reason given by compound bow users against the use of crossbows were exactly the same ones I heard back in the 1970s opposing compound bows.
After plenty of debating and trial situations, crossbows were finally permitted for hunting statewide in 2009. None of the gloom and doom predictions about them came true, and by 2015, about 56 percent of the deer harvested during the archery season were with a crossbow. Currently, that number is closer to 70 percent.
It seems like most Pennsylvania bowhunters have made the adjustment to crossbows.