Since 2005, Wisconsin has lost about 10% of deer hunters across all license types.
“The loss of deer hunters is a widespread, long standing nationwide concern,” said Dan Storm, a research scientist with the DNR’s Office of Applied Sciences.
Storm told the Natural Resources Board at its recent meeting that understanding the decline has become a top priority for the Bureau of Wildlife Management.
The Applied Science’s initial research projects the state could lose another 100,000 to 190,000 male hunters by 2040.
“We often hear that the loss of hunters is due to the aging of the baby boomer generation, and that is certainly a contributing factor that baby boomers are numerically large cohort with high participation rates, but the decline started well before baby boomers would have been dropping out due to age,” said Adam Moore, another Applied Sciences researcher working on the study.
Projections for female deer hunters, of which there are significantly fewer of in the state, was less clear. Different scenarios showed a slight increase, a decrease, or fairly steady number.
“Even if the most optimistic scenario occurs, the gains would fall well short of the projected declines in the male hunter population,” Moore told the board.
Moore said the declines are largely attributed to long-term trends rather than specific events in a given year or particular cohorts or age groups.
Hunting and fishing in general in the US has seen a decline over the years with less than 5% of the population being hunters based on license sales.
“Our ability to manage deer populations across much of the state is already stretched. Think about the future where we have 100,000 fewer hunters, or even fewer than,” said Storm. “The issues with deer overabundance, forest and crop damage, deer/vehicle collisions, CWD spread, they're just simply going to worsen.”
Storm also pointed to loss of revenue from fewer license sales and tax on ammunition and firearms that help fund conservation.
Analyzing the license numbers is part of phase one of research on this topic.
Storm says they are also planning to look into the patterns and reasons hunters stop, how can the decline be reversed or slowed, and what managing deer might look like with fewer hunters on the landscape.
The research presentation generated some discussion among board members about how to retain or gain hunters as well as motivate hunters to harvest more deer. The revenue hunters generate from the department was also discussed.
“It's going to be the responsibility of everybody here in the state to look at, how do we ultimately fund conservation efforts going forward,” said Eric Lobner, the division administrator for the DNR Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Division.
There was no action taken by the board. The presentation was informational only.
