Fewer and fewer U.S. hunters to be found as urban areas grow

First of two parts

When Bryan Dinkins was a teenager and winter came, he piled into his grandfather's car before dawn and they headed out to hunt ducks. Morning crept up around them as they huddled together in the cold, talking in a hush about life and school.

Then, his grandfather would lean over and whisper in his ear.

"Here they come. Get ready," he would say, just as the ducks began to fly their way.

Dinkins is 40 now. He hasn't been hunting in six years.

His grandfather died, and Dinkins is busy. Besides, it would take him six hours to drive somewhere to hunt ducks in California.

This is hunting in the new century, where urbanization and busy lives get in the way. Hunting these days isn't just a question of when to go, but where to go. How much will it cost? And, more than ever, who will go?

Across the country, the number of hunters declined by more than 1 million from 1991 to 2001, or 7.3 percent, according to the Census Bureau and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The drop was even greater in the West: 9.6 percent.

Hunting has survived through generations by fathers passing it on to their children. Families bonded during hunting trips. Today, many people have given up on hunting or have never tried it at all.

"If we think about how the country was explored and developed, it was hunters, it was trappers," said Steve Williams, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. "If we lose that, I think in some way we lose part of the American character."

Dip in Washington

No other area of the country has seen a population boom like the West: a 5.2 percent jump from 2000 to 2003. Despite that increase, the number of hunters in the West, resident and nonresident, dropped by 236,000 in the decade ending in 2001. California had the largest drop — 38.6 percent — followed by Colorado, Arizona and Nevada.

Washington, Hawaii, Oregon and Wyoming had slight declines.

Most hunters said in a 2001 Census and Fish and Wildlife survey that they didn't hunt as much as they would have liked because they were too busy or had family or work obligations. The reasons were the same for why people gave up hunting altogether, another study found.

But simply finding a place to hunt is a problem today, said Mark Damian Duda, executive director of Responsive Management, a national public-opinion research firm for natural-resource issues. As the West becomes more urban, with new residents flocking to cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix, development inevitably leads to fewer hunting lands.

"A generation or so ago, it was still possible to take a son and daughter out to the country, knock on a farmer's door and be out in the field hunting in pretty short order," said George Cooper, spokesman for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

"That's how young people got into hunting. Loss of habitat due to sprawl and landowner worries about liability have made that sort of old-fashioned access hard to come by."

Access for wealthy

The West is full of public lands, but those who must rely on private land or just prefer it often find these days that they have to pay for the privilege. And it can be expensive; duck hunting for the season may cost $10,000 on a private hunting preserve.

That means the wealthy have more access, and it shows in the survey figures. While the number of hunters is down, they spent 29 percent more on trips and equipment in 2001 than they did 10 years earlier.

Tim Worley has been hunting since his father took him when he was 8, and now he takes his 12-year-old daughter, Jessica. She just made her first kill — a cinnamon teal hen.

Worley, 39, has an advantage in these crowded times. He lives in rural Smartsville, Calif., and a half-dozen hunting areas are within an hour's drive.

As the West's population expands, urban sprawl overtakes more habitat and hunters are too busy to go as much as they'd like, it'll be up to kids such as Jessica Worley to carry on the tradition.

A Responsive Management study found that if people are not exposed to hunting before they are 16 or 17, they probably won't hunt as adults. And the more people grow up in urban areas, Duda said, the less likely they are to be exposed to the hunting culture.

"That's the big, broad demographic trend that's taken its toll on hunting," he said.

Recruiting hunters

"There's a concerted effort among state fish and wildlife agencies to recruit and retain new hunters," said Williams, the Fish and Wildlife Service director. "What we lack in many places is just providing that training and opportunity, and states are addressing that in ways that they never had in the past."

Agencies are also working more with private landowners to open up more areas to the public. Several states have programs allowing public access to some private lands. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department, for example, pays landowners small sums in exchange for opening their land to the public.

"If we really want to expand habitat both in quantity and quality, we have got to reach out to private landowners," Cooper said.

But agencies that foster hunting face their own threats. Most depend on sales of hunting licenses to manage fish and wildlife. As the number of hunters drops, programs are cut and jobs are left unfilled.

Even Alaska, the Western state that logged the largest 10-year increase in hunters — 34.8 percent — is paring programs and leaving jobs vacant. There are more resident hunters in mostly rural Alaska than out-of-staters, but they pay less for licenses.

The state is asking for its first license-fee increase since 1993, saying it needs $3.8 million a year more to protect and expand hunting opportunities. Already, it has cut back on animal research and surveys that determine how many animals can be killed without affecting population survival.

Nevada also has trimmed surveys. It is leaving three warden positions unfilled and had to cut its 2006-2007 budget by $1.5 million. In Arizona, fish and game officials plan to ask the Legislature to raise caps on license fees.

California cuts

The states need the money but worry about driving away hunters.

"It's always tricky to know what's the tipping point that makes someone not want to put out the effort and the money to come as far as Alaska to hunt," said Tom Paul, federal-aid coordinator for Alaska's Division of Wildlife.

California is suffering the worst. The staff of fish and game wardens has been cut by 25 percent over the past few years; budgets for wildlife managers have been slashed; maintenance is lacking. Captures of bighorn sheep, deer and elk to put on radio tracking collars for research have been scrapped.

"We had counties where we didn't even have a warden present," said Lorna Bernard, spokeswoman for the California Department of Fish and Game. "It's been really tough, especially on our enforcement personnel."

Hunting dropped 19.3 percent in Colorado, but that state, which boasts one of the largest elk herds in North America, also hosted the most hunters in the West in 2001: 281,000. As a result, it has mostly escaped the budget problems of other Western states. And a few Western states even recorded an increase in hunter numbers, however small: New Mexico, Utah, Montana and Idaho.

It's a delicate relationship that hunters and state agencies share. States depend on hunters to help fund their conservation projects and to control animal populations.

"Traditionally, the people that have paid for and cared for wildlife have been hunters and anglers," said Steve Huffaker, director of Idaho Fish and Game and past president of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.

"If we lose that support base, then we're concerned who's going to be there to take up the needs of fish and wildlife in the future."

Tomorrow: Technology

and ethics among hunters