Are hunter numbers declining?

[Brian662]

Your neighbors are complaining that you are drawing in more neighborhood deer?

That is pretty common in my areas as well, but some landowners choose to maximize cropland rental dollars and some choose to maximize hunting opportunities.

Yes, been going on in MN and WI for several years. Anything from complaints they don't see deer like they used to, hunting isn't what it was, etc. Others make comments in passing that they see all the deer traveling my way once the crops come off.

Last year in WI there were several that made comments after opening weekend. I have to slow play how many deer I see after they say "between the three of us we only saw 4 deer all weekend".

I know my situation isnt unique. But it adds to the lack of accessibility for the resource which could have a potential negative impact on hunter numbers as managing neighbors become more effective. IMO

 

[Hoytvectrix]

It all comes full circle with the other thread (on neighbors). How much should someone be allowed to own/lease/hunt before it becomes a detriment to society or most importantly, the resource (in this case, the deer herd).

The resource is the holy grail. Access to the resource has been made more difficult (expensive) in most places but it's much easier to harvest the resource with the plentiful options of weapons (see Dawgs post on everyone gets a trophy).

I think landowners and managers play an underappreciated role in resource conservation. Probably the largest and most important for most states. We are a very small minority though and are likely not representative of the average hunter. Like you said, it's a double edged sword and is tying up land for the better-off going to matter in 50 or 100 years if only 0.05% of the population gets to enjoy their wildlife?

I hunt public land in MN and I used to dabble in public in MO where I own my farm. I think both states have their strengths and weaknesses for how they manage the public land I've seen. I hope states continue to raise awareness of the role that public lands play in conservation and public recreation. I had an opposite path of many who hunt public land where I began hunting private and branched out to public for more frequent opportunities. Many of the people I come across on public seem almost jaded that someone else is using the same area as them, even if it is out of season. Interestingly, non-residents seem much more appreciative of the resource than residents.

Maybe it is knowing how expensive an acre of land is and what it takes to manage it, but I feel spoiled getting to go wander and scout a +10,000 acre piece of public. I'm not sure what this rambling has to do with my original post other than to say people from all backgrounds need to understand their role in the conservation of these resources.

 

[Hoytvectrix]

I don't think the people who are worried about hunter recruitment want worse hunting experiences for themselves or anyone else. I think they are worried about what happens as hunting demographics shift towards the European model of hunting and it is a resource that is mostly appreciated by the wealthy.

I want as many people speaking for their wildlife resources as possible, and certainly I don't want people making decisions for wildlife that are completely removed from it.

 

[Wind Gypsy]

Yes, been going on in MN and WI for several years. Anything from complaints they don't see deer like they used to, hunting isn't what it was, etc. Others make comments in passing that they see all the deer traveling my way once the crops come off.

Last year in WI there were several that made comments after opening weekend. I have to slow play how many deer I see after they say "between the three of us we only saw 4 deer all weekend".

I know my situation isnt unique. But it adds to the lack of accessibility for the resource which could have a potential negative impact on hunter numbers as managing neighbors become more effective. IMO

At some point it’s people’s own fault for stomping through their cover and paying no mind to the wind. A little food and security isn’t that tough.

 

[Westwind]

Non-resident deer hunter numbers in Kansas are higher than they have ever been and getting higher. Why is that important? Because when they replace a resident hunter, we lose a hunter nationally. Kansas may still sell the same number of deer tags to the same number of hunters, but if that guy also accounts for a tag in 3 other states, he has replaced 3 hunters nationally assuming they aren’t increasing overall tags (which Kansas is definitely not). That is not sustainable.


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This is a great point. I got a phone call from an out of state hunter just yesterday. He had sent a letter to my neighbor asking him to hunt and for some reason my neighbor gave him my number. While I’m not looking to allow any hunting we had a pretty nice chat and I found it interesting that someone was willing to put in some effort.

 

[Westwind]

At some point it’s people’s own fault for stomping through there cover and paying no mind to the wind. A little food and security isn’t that tough.

I consider myself a duck hunter first and a deer hunter second but I’m always kind of surprised how oblivious guys who seem to have made an exclusive hobby out of deer hunting have never thought about this.

 

[SwampCat]

It all comes full circle with the other thread (on neighbors). How much should someone be allowed to own/lease/hunt before it becomes a detriment to society or most importantly, the resource (in this case, the deer herd).

The resource is the holy grail. Access to the resource has been made more difficult (expensive) in most places but it's much easier to harvest the resource with the plentiful options of weapons (see Dawgs post on everyone gets a trophy).

My neighbors have access to the resource, same as they always did. If I outwork them or hunt smarter or more efficiently, and as a result their access to the resource is diminished, who is at fault? These things are happening, feedback has been received. My hard work has been rewarded but it comes at a cost to my neighbor, the resource is finite...my feelings are conflicted. Somebody wins and somebody loses. To the victor goes the spoils, I guess.

Here, that works in reverse. If you are a small landowner you want a larger landowner to be your next door neighbor - one who likes to manage deer. In reality, how much management can a 15 acre landowner do - especially one who lives on his property and is just scraping by financially. I have 14 adjacent landowners. Five of them own more land than my 350 acres. One owns 70 acres. The rest mostly own ten to twenty. Those smaller landowners are glad to have me as a neighbor. Go look where they locate their feeders - 20 ft off my property line. If i was a cattle rancher like most of the big land neighbors and didnt have high deer density like I do, these smaller land owners would rarely see a deer. They are proud to live next to me.

Public land duck hunters are the ones who are sucking hind tit. There are more non res duck hunters in AR than resident. Our G&F has sold out the resident hunters to make a dollar. We have non residents living in their trucks on green tree reservoir wma’s for ten days prior to season opening. It is a nightmare. Non residents have taken over all the good public duck land.

I agree, we are slowly headed towards a hunting system like Europe. We lease 800 acres wetland from a farmer, mainly for duck hunting. Up until five or six years ago, there were 20 people in on the lease. The farmer got tired of putting up with that many vehicles parked around his equipment area and terminated the lease. Three years later, six of us approached him about leasing the ground for the same price the 20 were leasing it for. Some of those 20 also deer hunted the land - great deer habitat. He leased it to us. So now there are six who displaced 20. Non of us have even deer hunted the 800 acres in the three years we have had it leased.

We took the duck hunting opportunity from 20 hunters and replaced it with six. Took the deer hunting opportunity from six or eight and replaced it with none. This is the direction almost all hunting land is headed

 

[Mortenson]

I can't really say I know of less hunters out, but this was the fewest shots I've ever heard on the opening season. I feel like I've been saying that yearly. On Friday, all we heard were my 2 boys' shots and 1 other. My dad hunted til quitting time and said zero. Then Sat, 2 shots including my dad's. Sunday zero. I think it's several factors, some of which include guys holding out for bigger deer, and IL offering so many seasons now. A lot of guys probably already have a tag punched on a crossbow deer. When I was young, we had two 3-day gun seasons. Now, including youth and ML, there are 6 gun seasons. That would have to spread out the shots.

 

[SwampCat]

I know 40 years ago, I heard a lot more shooting. Not that many people participated in archery sports, ml season was present, but not that many folks participated in that. A lot of the land in my area was commercial timberland - open to the public. Dog hunting was extremely popular. No antler restrictions, so nobody was passing any buck. There was a hunter parked at every pullout. Orange clad hunters at every gas station and country store. I have not seen another hunter wearing orange this year besides my group. Not that they dont, they just arent as hard at it as they were 40 years ago. A lot of the rural population has moved to the city for jobs. Within 1.5 miles of my house are six abandoned residences that are crumbling down - the owners gone to the city. Most of the folks previously living in those houses would have deer hunted a lot back when they lived here. Now they have become weekend warriors or quit.

 

[Bowsnbucks]

This has been brought up a few times in other threads and I didn't want to side-track those discussions. The debate about hunting numbers seems to be all over the place. Some seem to think the number of hunters is about to fall off a cliff and others think hunter numbers have never been higher. There are entire national initiatives about expanding hunter recruitment and there are movements like Hunt Quietly that seem to think that declining hunter numbers is just fear mongering.

I came across the USFWS website that has all of the hunting number data that is searchable by time and location (state vs. nationally).
This is the tool. If that doesn't load, I found that through this website: https://partnerwithapayer.org/funding-sources/ (You need to go down to Hunting License Data).

Here is a screenshot for national data overtime:
View attachment 85930

Interestingly, the raw numbers are lower than their peak in the 1980's, but not nearly as down as I would have expected. However, when you adjust for number of hunters overtime by the population of the country or state, it quickly becomes apparent that the percent of the population that are hunting is going down.
From the peak in 1982 when 16.75 million licenses were sold, around 7.2% of the population bought a hunting license. In 2024, there were 15.9 million licenses sold, with around 4.7% of the population that bought hunting licenses. I am not sure of how accurate the past data are, but if anything I would assume that it was likely underestimating the number of people that were actually hunting before the digital age. My dad describes the 70s of deer hunting in Missouri as the wild west and he makes it sound like there was a lot of questionable hunting methods going on and questions how many people actually bought licenses. Also worth mentioning, is that my dad said there were probably 5 quail hunters for every deer hunter in the 70s to early 80s in our area of Missouri.

A couple of things that would be important to point out:
* These numbers do not break down deer hunting licenses vs turkey or other game

* Some states have seen a substantial increase in number of licenses sold and others have seen substantial decrease. Georgia has seen a more than 150% increase and Michigan a 45% decrease from their max and mins. This could be from how licenses are reported by the state, but it might also speak to why there are wildly different answers to the question if the number of hunters is going down or not.

* Even if the number of hunters were to stay the same (whether overall or adjusted as a percent of the population), the amount of land to hunt is without question going down. I would love to find acreages of habitat that have been displaced because of human development and plot that against hunter numbers.

* Something that I have not seen written about much that I think is really important for hunter number discussions is the amount of time people are spending hunting now. I think if you asked deer hunters in the 80's and 90's, the vast majority only hunted for the opening of the main firearm season. Today, more and more people are archery hunting or using muzzleloaders in late season in addition to the main firearm season. If the license numbers were unchanged overtime but people were spending more time in the field, it would certainly seem like there were more hunters.

Available land is absolutely declining as "development" is non-stop. It gags me that blighted cities, towns, and industrial areas are abandoned - empty buildings falling apart - and the race is on for great farmland, any rural areas, brushy fields, meadows, wetlands, etc. Instead of "developing" pristine land - why not bulldoze those sh***y areas and rebuild on those sites?

Here in Pa. there were wild areas in the northern tier counties that have been invaded by natural gas companies. They bulldozed roads through wild, pristine areas, cleared untold acres of prime hardwood forest to put in pumping stations, well pads, and numerous storage buildings. Those areas will never be the same, lost to big oil & gas company "development". They even paved some of those mountain roads, widening them out to pass tractor trailers on them. Now, everybody and their brother can access what were formerly remote areas, throwing out their trash, beer cans, bottles, food containers. Great "development" for prime, native habitat, right??? (we ARE the smartest animals on the planet, correct???)

Pa. has had declining hunter numbers for some years now. Used to be 1.5 million licenses sold every year for decades. Now they struggle to hit 1 million, and have gone even lower on sales. The law change that allows much younger kids to hunt gets a few kids out, but reports are they get extremely bored when they don't see any deer, and resort to playing video games on their phones or tablets instead of watching for deer. Times have changed. Attention spans are much shorter in young people today. Our sons when they were in high school some years ago before college, had very few friends that showed any interest in hunting .... and even fishing. Don't see a big change coming in the positive direction.

Def more guys archery hunting & with early muzzy here too.

 

[Wind Gypsy]

Available land is absolutely declining as "development" is non-stop. It gags me that blighted cities, towns, and industrial areas are abandoned - empty buildings falling apart - and the race is on for great farmland, any rural areas, brushy fields, meadows, wetlands, etc. Instead of "developing" pristine land - why not bulldoze those sh***y areas and rebuild on those sites?

1. Demolition costs money
2. It's in a "blighted" city as you called it. Businesses dont want to be near the blight and business owners dont want to live there or commute there.
3. Permitting and building in such in area might be more expensive
4. Possibly taxes

If i had a business looking for commercial space, I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in the cesspool that is minneapolis vs say on the outside edge of the suburbs.

 

[Bowsnbucks]

1. Demolition costs money
2. It's in a "blighted" city as you called it. Businesses dont want to be near the blight and business owners dont want to live there or commute there.
3. Permitting and building in such in area might be more expensive
4. Possibly taxes

If i had a business looking for commercial space, I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in the cesspool that is minneapolis vs say on the outside edge of the suburbs.

1. Nothing is free, new construction on newly prepped site work isn't cheap either.
2. Many cities are knocking down old, run-down areas and building new housing, offices of various kinds, restaurants, gyms, hair salons, etc. - many times in one big complex with security entry only for the housing sections. Population stats say people are moving closer to cities because that's where better salaries, entertainment, sports venues, better medical care is found, etc. IMO, beats paving over every green space to be had.
3. Some cities are more flexible on permits because it helps re-build old, neglected areas to draw in more residents. Permits aren't cheap anywhere.
4. Agreements have been made in some places to reduce taxes for specified periods in such areas to lure in developers = new residents.

Back to hunter numbers declining, and comments about losing places to hunt ..... do we keep on "developing" and paving every green spot, every patch of woods or fields? Around where we live - every piece of greenery is being "developed". Places that were actually green suburbs are now so built up, people want to move even further "out" to get away from all the traffic, sprawl, views of unbroken roof tops, etc. Constant human migration at what / how many costs?