Fading pastime? Hunters becoming diminishing breed
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4/9/2008 - 4/10/08
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The night Henry Ford turned 7, his father took him on his first coon hunt.Their two black and tan hounds treed five raccoons in one white pine.
That experience — sleeping next to the tree all night while the hounds bayed at the trapped raccoons until Ford and his father could see to shoot them at daybreak —hooked the Caldwell County boy on what was then a way to make money.
At 83, Ford is still hunting, though not for the pelts. He just loves it. He taught his sons and grandsons to run coonhounds and is working on his 2-year-old great-grandson.
But he realizes a sad fact borne out by hunting license sales and national surveys: He and other hunters of everything from raccoons to bears are falling in number in the Carolinas and across the country.
In the past decade, the number of hunters has declined about 10 percent nationwide. During the same period, the population rose by 5 percent. Since 2002, Carolinas hunting license sales have dropped by nearly 13,000 while the states' combined populations rose by more than 1 million.
Wildlife management officials say urbanization, sprawling development and competition for free time have resulted in fewer hunters. Not as many boys are taking up a rite of passage that goes back to frontier times, leading to an aging of the hunting population.
"Fifteen years ago, you couldn't go into the woods without running into a coon hunter," Ford said, "and now you can hunt three nights a week and never see one."
Carolinas hunting license sales have stayed flat this decade while the population has ballooned. That concerns those who care about hunting from both a conservation point of view and a cultural one.
"For good or bad, the notion of the boy's initiation into the adult male world is being lost," said Ted Ownby, a professor of history and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi.
Moreover, hunters and anglers pay the bulk of the cost of fish and wildlife management and conservation through excise taxes on sporting equipment. When their numbers drop, so does the income for those programs.
The national trend has moved the Carolinas and other states, along with private hunting organizations, to work on reversing the decline by teaching youth about hunting and streamlining often complex hunting laws that vary from county to county.
"Years ago, when I was a child hunting, it was such a part of the culture, it was a father or uncle or grandfather that introduced the youngsters to hunting," said Wes Coltrane, a Quail Unlimited director in North Carolina. "That's not the case in too many cases today."
Quail Unlimited reaches out to youth groups by teaching them about hunting safety and introducing them to the hunting experience.
One factor in the hunting decline is that a lot of people moving here settle in more urbanized areas than Carolinians have traditionally lived, meaning they're farther from hunting grounds, said Brad Gunn, a section manager with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.
The commission has increased education on hunting opportunities and is encouraging those who've let their hunting licenses lapse to renew.
Other methods include:
- A new booklet targeting disabled hunters with information about hunts tailored to their needs.
- A search option on the commission's Web site to help people find hunting lands by ZIP code.
- Youth hunting days before official hunting seasons open.
- Efforts to get a hunting heritage license law passed to allow teenagers to skip hunting education requirements for a year while they give hunting a try.
It's hard to measure success, but North Carolina has already seen lapsed hunters renew licenses after getting one of the commission's reminders. South Carolina is conducting a study to see if its campaign worked.
The fact that fewer people are hunting may actually deepen the tradition's meaning to those who still practice it, Ownby said.
"It becomes really important to people who aren't going to be able to hunt very often, a sign that I'm not becoming just like any other modern kid who's online every day, does text messaging and has 300 TV channels. I'm connected to my male ancestors. I've learned something that makes me different."
Ford's grandson, 24-year-old Andrew Ford, sees the decline in hunting among his peers. He hunts with his grandfather and cousins, but said he has a hard time convincing buddies to accompany them. That hasn't diminished his own enthusiasm for the sport, though.
"Everybody's getting lazy. They party or just lay around," he said on a hunt in February. "There's not a lot of people that hunt anymore, especially coon hunting. There's other stuff to do."
When asked why he does it, the younger Ford paused in thought.
"I don't know how to answer that. I just love to hunt."
