Late last winter, the Wildlife Management Unit 7M Deer Management Citizen Task Force, an appointed stakeholder group living within the unit and from all walks of life, recommended that the Department of Environmental Conservation reduce the unit's ongoing annual deer population by approximately ten percent. This would be done via the future number of deer management permits (DMPs) that are issued by the DEC to harvest antlerless deer. The primary reasoning of the task force's request was largely based on damages caused by deer – depredation of crops and domestic flora, collisions with motor vehicles, etc. However, the annual harvest data collected by the DEC indicated the number of antlerless deer taken in the unit should be reduced. The DEC's primary management guide is the bucks taken per square mile, and when that figure began dropping steadily in the unit over the past few years, it signaled that the deer population in WMU 7M had been decreasing. So last year no management permits were issued, a move to allow the herd to stabilize and probably increase slightly in 2006. But to honor the decision of the task force, the DEC issued more 7M permits for 2006 that it had probably intended