Just look at the number of hunting licenses sold in Iowa and pheasant population numbers. I sat through a seminar at Pheasant Fest in Des Moines a couple years ago and the DNR guy presenting was worried because of the very things I described. The DNR guy had several graphs to show the correlation between hunting licenses sold in Iowa and pheasant population numbers. They mirror each other exactly. At the seminar the DNR guy said they were forming a committee to discuss how to increase the pheasant numbers because they were already loosing hunters every year and the decline in pheasants was accelerating the loss of license sales/revenue. Every year the average age of Iowa's hunters get one year older. Also with less and less habitat available it increases the pressure for access for that land that has suitable pheasant habitat no different than deer hunting. Decreased access and quality hunting leads to decreased participation which leads to more hunters giving up the sport. I could name 20 guys that haven't pheasant hunted in the last 10 years that never missed a season the 20 years prior to that and I could name ten guys that have given up deer hunting in the last 5 years and all are in their 50's. I ran into a guy just a week ago that I hadn't seen in 5 years. I asked him how he has done deer hunting the last few years. Keep in mind that this guy has bow hunted since the mid 80's and gun/late muzzy hunted since the early 90's. His reply was...I quit hunting three years ago. I couldn't believe it because I would have classified him as a die hard deer hunter 10 years ago. The kind of guy that deer hunted every spare second that he had. He said that he now just goes ice fishing and started talking about all the fish he catches. Once a guy throws in the towel they don't usually go back.
