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Has anyone witnessed any impact from this yet? Given my small sphere of exposure, I really have not, at least as far as I can tell.

- My one-man bow shop is still in operation. - Popular stores (Green Tops in Richmond,VA) are still packed - Outfitters seem well booked and have not lowered prices (based on supply and demand). - Draw odds still seem low for many tags out West and NR quotas are still being filled in states like MT. Still seems to take 2-3 years to get an IA archery tag?

I got to thinking about this yesterday during the first day of gun season here in VA. I hunt in the back of the house, just mainly to listen for shots and maybe get lucky and have someone chase a buck onto my small acreage. In past years, I could count on close shots coming from neighboring properties along with the usual barrages from much farther away. Despite perfect weather ... there was nothing! I almost thought I got the date wrong! So either the bucks were not showing themselves or was hunter participation off?

Will the changes be subtle enough that the new "norm" will be well established before we actually realize it?

They said that 20 years ago there were 250,000 pheasant hunters in the state, this year they have 50,000.

Numbers like that are pretty telling.

Never experienced it but understand that it was a big deal back then with the VFWs doing fundraisers like pancake breakfasts, motels booked up and hunters/dogs all over.

Kind of worry about that here in my neck of the woods with deer. With a 3 buck/3 doe limit, 7 weeks of rifle and dog running, the deer get a lot of pressure here and my sightings have been declining every year for the last 5. Maybe they just relocated but I can't go after them. If hunters (especially young or casual hunters) are not seeing deer, then they can quickly lose interest.

While on this particular subtopic, one thing I have noticed here the last few years is way more hunt clubs advertising for members on Craigslist. I never recall seeing that 5 or 10 years ago since membership was so exclusive and limited to family and close friends.

PA sold 257k archery licenses in 2006. That steadily climbed to 328k in 2016. Up 27% in a decade. That encompasses when crossbows were legalized, I think 2009. We have the highest bowhunter density in the nation per QDMA statistics.

I have no statistics to cite, but just anecdotally I know every year more and more people are being pushed onto public land due to changing land use practices. Largely driven by leasing and greed over deer, which changed in the course of a generation.

It's a conundrum. I get it. I am an accountant. I get the cold hard numbers. There are going to be tough budgetary choices to make. People are going to lose jobs, programs are going to be cut. But life will go on. The sky is not falling. For the everyday hunter this is going to matter little I think.

And as a hunter from a very personal level I don't get the warm and fuzzies when I see the recruitment propaganda. Yeah, come join me and all my buddies on already crowded public land! Nah, we're good, thanks!

1. The economy from 2008 to 2017 made it difficult for a lot of people to continue hunting like they did because their incomes were reduced. When you're fighting to keep your home, deer hunting suddenly drops down on your list of "MUST DO" things.

2. Recruitment of younger hunters. This is a multi-faceted situation. Part of it is lack of small game. Most of the hunting I did in my teens was for small game. Many of the farms in our area had the deer hunting reserved for family/guests. Small game however, was there for the asking. Between my 3 teenage hunting buddies and myself, we had enough access to hunt small game whenever we wanted. THAT is what made us hunters, not watching hunting on TV.

Today, if a young person wants to hunt he/she is pretty much SOL unless they have a relative who hunts who can get them on ground. And if the only hunting they do is deer hunting then they are not going to have the foundation of experience they need to be woodsmen. Sitting in a tree and shooting at game ONCE a year does NOT make one a hunter.

There is no winter habitat left for the birds. Fence rows have be dozed, creeks have been straightened, old farmsteads cleared, any small patch of brush or timber has been dozed, tiled, and planted. Every square inch must be planted with corn and soybeans when your land is worth $5-9K per acre.

I am somewhat neutral on this and willing to roll with the changes, to a certain extent, that economy and society attitudes bring about. Just curious to see what others have observed, knowing that there will be local exceptions to the overall general trend.

Read another article that stated in OH, 10 years ago, the archery take was 10% of the total harvest. Last year it went up 45% and from the archery harvest, 60% were taken with a crossbow.

Me thinks not! At least not out west. I’d say I see a surge in big game hunters for sure. Maybe a decline in bird/ small game hunting but not big game.

The technological shift in entertainment coupled with the changing morays in what constitutes acceptable child rearing accounts for the majority recruitment decline, imo. As WW alluded, when I was a kid, my brother and I would quite often take our .22s and disappear in the surrounding woods of the house. All day. No problem. Or, we would be riding dirt bikes. That was as advanced as technology got for us. Technology drove kids outside for entertainment. Now, it directs kids inside.

Now, couple that with the social demands for the constant direct supervision of children and we have a problem for any vigorous outside activity.

It was quiet around my place Saturday, too, but New Kent county lost its season-long doe days a few years ago. That accounts for a lot LESS shooting during GF season.

I've attached a link so you can see how badly VA compares to other states.

To go along with several other comments, it seems like life is just getting too hectic. Every friend of mine that has kids has them wrapped up in so many activities that they have hardly enough time for sleep let alone hunting. Hunting is becoming less a way of life or a necessity and more of a leisure activity. Additionally, pretty much every hunter I know, myself included got started with years of bird and small game hunting. Now everyone just wants big bucks like on TV and youtube. However, without learning the required hunting skills honed through years of stalking squirrels and rabbits, aspiring hunters are unsuccessful and quickly get bored and quit.

All that said, big game hunting is out of control, especially on public land. Every year it seems like my elk spots have double the number of hunters from the year before.

Unreal numbers of hunters in the woods.

Overcrowding is a big problem here and the number of hunters in bow season has gotten ridiculous with bow hunters, muzzle loader hunters and rifle hunters all piled into the same time of year.

CPW loves it! Colorado makes the most of any state for hunting license sales and the recent changes will put even more money in their coffers.

Honestly though, I don't see it in my neck of the woods. More and more people are getting into hunting as far as I can tell where I hunt. I think they like to report on some areas that are in decline and make it national news when it's really a small segment. I have no facts to back up my opinion so don't ask me for any stats! Ha:) I just see lots of sitka dudes around more and more.

From what I gather here, with the exception of localized variances, is that there is more of a paradigm shift that makes it challenge to see any reduction in hunters really. Some of these include gun hunters taking up crossbows and populating the archery woods and serious big game hunters just hunting harder (and in more places as NRs) and replacing the lost small game or more casual hunters.

It is very important to point out that the state fish and game agencies are funded by license sales and Pittman-Robertson (PR) funds. Each agency receives funds from PR based on their sales of hunting and fishing licenses. So each state is motivated to inflate their sales in order to receive more PR funds.

Now, if we could just figure out how to replace Bob Duncan. I see it this way: if your favorite NFL team had a losing season for 15 years straight do you think the coach would keep his job? It is Bob Duncan's job to sell hunting licenses and he is failing miserably. He makes over $150,000 by the way. And, he's got to be about to retire.

1. When I first started bowhunting my buddies and I all hunted each other's spots, public, private, etc. One weekend we'd all go to someone's farm and set stands and have fun hunting, etc and we'd go to another place or the same place the next weekend if we had some luck. Well now the horn porn and love of big deer has overcome every other aspect of the hunt. We protect our land with electronic cameras, etc to the point we don't even tell our friends where saw the last "freak nasty swamp donkey". Those that don't own their own land can't hunt with their buddies anymore because they "don't have that many shooters" this year or whatever so they are forced onto ever diminishing public tracts.

2. We have greater and greater access to information on the web and social media. Folks back in the day only dreamed of going west to hunt. Now it's super easy for anyone to jump in a truck with a couple buddies and head out west to hunt. You can use the internet to narrow down your trailhead and even what drainage you want to hunt from the comfort of your easy chair at home. There's far more better and cheaper gear now to keep even novices out of trouble and comfortable on those western hunts. Everything is more accessible for the average Joe. This is a good thing in my opinion but it exposes western hunters to far more competition and decreases draw odds in turn.

The farms I hunted pheasants on as a kid barely have enough cover to support a field mouse. It's just all gone. Bulldozed, tiled and tilled.

I believe small game hunter numbers are down. Deer hunters....no. More popular than ever. The last ten years everyone has become a deer hunter. If anything, even more people want to go, there isnt enough habitat to support all the people that want to deer hunt. Try finding a place to go in Iowa, and you'll see what I mean....

BINGO

I'd like to see someone from another state's fish and game department take control of VA's DGIF (department of game and inland fisheries). The job pays well and VA has a lot of potential. VA can only improve.

Here at this link are the top paying positions in the DGIF. The office is just northeast of Richmond and the entire building is only a few years old.

Trying to convince non consumptive users, to buy a hunting license, has not been a great sale either.......

I do not want to misquote, but I thought I heard a guy say, that Montana is also having the same issues,,,,,, but not sure

IMO, the deer are under too much pressure and quality/quantity have been on the decline for year (in my woods at least), but each year nothing changes with respect to bag limits or seasons.

So they have to find other resources to benefit game and non-game. A few years ago Oregon proposed taxing bird food, but that got shot down.

There's a significant difference between "More/Less hunters" and "More/Less hunting pressure." The data collected by USFWS shows that UNIQUE hunters ( not licenses purchased, https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/fhwar.html ) is declining yearly, not to mention that the population of the country is increasing, thus percentage of the hunting population is significantly decreasing. What we're seeing right now is LESS hunters with MORE hunting pressure, for the following reasons:

1.) Lack of access. As private ground is closed to hunting due to subdivision, suburban development, leasing ( fewer hunters per acres ), anti-hunting sentiment and other reasons, hunters have two options; stop hunting or hunt where others hunt ( public land ). The leasing is a much bigger deal than I think people realize. Growing up, I used to hunt 500 acres of whitetail country along with 7 or 8 of our friends and family. In 1998, ONE person came along and leased it all for himself. That wasn't the only block of land he had leased, either. The worst part is, we're doing this to ourselves due to greed.

2.) Good economy. Hunters can afford to buy more licenses and travel out of state.

3.) Information prevalence. The internet makes it extremely easy to find hunts, apply for tags, e-scout and research statistics. All the western groups promote applying everywhere you possibly can, and people are following.

4.) Social Media - I think most people undervalue this. For the younger hunters especially, they're motivated to hunt more, more often because social media makes one feel like they must put as much possible into a hobby, otherwise they're a "poser" or "not serious" about it. I kid you not, one podcast I listen to, that I generally really like, seemed to indicate that if you weren't shooting a 160+ mule deer and 280+ elk every year, then you weren't trying very hard.

There's also been some demographic shifts within hunting.

Deer hunting over small game as the introductory hunt. Why? In my opinion its twofold; because whitetailed deer are at nearly all time high populations and the small game hunting on public land is generally terrible (at least around here). I have much more confidence in taking a new hunter out and finding them a deer than I do in having a fun small game hunt. Shooting a deer standing broadside in a field is also a lot easier on a new hunter than winging shot at running/flying small target animals.

Archery hunting is no longer a late stage hunter hobby, but rather the preffered method for new hunters. Why? For all the reasons archers have been espousing for years (less pressure, more natural animals, more skill, less obtrusive)! Adult Onset Hunters especially want to feel a closer connection to their take, and gun hunting is often considered more crude. There's a secondary reason for the increase in archery hunting, and its tied to the Social Media I mentioned above. With the drive to extend your seasons, the obvious answer to that is to take up archery with its long seasons and easier to obtain tags.

Someone above mentioned that the number of archers in Colorado has doubled since the 1980s. The population of Colorado has as well; 2.9 million vs 5.7 million. If we just look at elk hunters, 2005 had 246,521 while 2017 only had 223,269. ( http://cpw.state.co.us/thingstodo/Pages/Statistics-Elk.aspx ). There's no arguing archery hunting is way up, but the thread is about hunting in general, not just archery ( though I realize this is bowsite ).

Some of you joked about taking up a gun to get away from the pressure, but, species and location depending, that's exactly what my wife did. She's started getting rifle hunt tags with few other tag holders, and I'll be honest, its been a lot of fun. We often have the whole piece of land to ourselves, and success rates have been good. Most rifle hunters we've run into have not been willing to put in the effort that we see other hunters invest during archery seasons.

Half of all hunters are over 55 years old. If that's not indicative of a coming crash, I don't know what is.

Looks like from 1991 to 2011, the percentage of hunters under the age of 45 dropped from 71% to 45%.