WMU 5D — Pennsylvania

Tags & season

Fees and draw dates from Pennsylvania Game Commission, 2026-27, verified 2026-08-12. Tag type from the agency's published draw statistics: a wmu that appears in none of them has no limited-entry hunt we know of. Source: PGC — Licence types and prices · 58 Pa. Code § 143.202 — Elk application, $10 nonrefundable fee · 34 Pa.C.S. § 2709 — Issuing agent compensation · PGC — Antlerless deer licence rounds · PGC — Final 2026-27 seasons and bag limits · PGC — Licence year catalog (the printed fee schedule; the only PGC publication carrying the elk licence price).

Season conditions — measured, not vibes

Harvest — agency survey estimates

Per-WMU deer, bear and turkey counts, 2009-2024, taken from the Feature Service behind PGC's public harvest dashboards rather than from PDFs. No hunter counts and no success rates: Pennsylvania does not sell licences by WMU, so no per-unit denominator exists in any publication, and deriving one from statewide sales would be inventing a number the agency does not have. Empty here means the agency does not know either. Bear carries a real male/female split. Deer does not — the published split is antlered/antlerless, and while antlered deer are male, the antlerless class includes button bucks, so it is reported as a total plus an antlered count and never as "female". Two exclusions, both counted rather than silently dropped. Spring turkey for licence year 2023 is withheld: the service's LicenseYear is inconsistent across columns in that row — fall turkey and bear are calendar 2023 but the spring figures are spring 2024, verified against report 27013 (1A=2215.67, 2D=3619.77, 5D=114.91), and spring 2023 is absent from the service entirely. And the "UK" bucket — harvest PGC could not assign to a WMU, ~780 deer in 2024 — is skipped, since it matches no unit. WMU 2H appears in rows through 2022. It was eliminated in April 2023 and the boundary layer carries only active units, so those rows are real history that joins to no current unit page. That is correct, not drift. Spring turkey success rates by WMU, with standard errors, DO exist — in report 27013, a different source from this one. Ingesting them is the obvious next round and would make PA the only state where we publish a per-unit success rate the agency computed rather than one we derived. Source: PGC Historic Harvest Data (Big Game Historic Harvests by WMU) · PGC Wildlife Management Annual Reports (spring turkey, report 27013).