Are hunters becoming endangered species?

This Sunday, Oct.1, small game hunters can commence their quests to spend enjoyable autumn days afield while also benefiting from the satisfaction of occasionally harvesting their own food, or at least some of the meat portion of their family's diet. Whether it's wild turkey, ruffed grouse, cottontail rabbit or squirrel, the query harvested via hunting is as honest and straightforward an endeavor as is growing your own vegetables.

A few generations ago, the general acceptance toward harvesting one's own food was widespread. But as recent generations have been forced to leave rural areas and scrambled to the larger urban areas to find better paying jobs, their ties with the earth and what it can provide us are evaporating. More and more, we have become hunters of the dollar while being totally dependant on third-party strangers to provide us with our food. Whether it's meat, vegetables or fruits, we normally have no true knowledge of where it actually came from or what it endured before we bought it. That's not the case when we harvest our own food.

Unless you're a farmer or rancher who raises livestock or poultry, those of us in rural areas are pretty much dependant on someone else for our food. But by spending some time hunting, we can occasionally enjoy the experience and satisfaction, however brief, of self-dependency. Certainly precious few of us can claim being totally self-sufficient when it comes to our food, but just having the ability and desire to supplement store-bought food with some we've harvested ourselves is a good feeling in this age of abundant fast food businesses and super markets.

Although the hunting heritage is still quite strong in Chenango and many other rural counties, the profile of hunting has changed from what it was a half century ago. This has as much to do with demographics as it does with the game and habitat available. During the two or so decades following WWII, I'd hazard a guess that the majority of male residents in our area hunted, and quite regularly. There was still an abundance of operating farms, many of which were open to hunters who asked permission. Our state forests had not reached the climax stage, employment opportunities were still good, and land prices and taxes were reasonable. Pheasants were quite plentiful, as were rabbits, squirrels and grouse. Deer densities were just beginning to rise, much to the delight of most hunters. But around the 1970s, things began to change.

Farms were going out of business and their lands were increasingly being subdivided and sold, often to new residents who hailed from more urbanized regions. As increasingly more of this occurred, lands that were once cultivated quickly reverted to early-stage growth, and then brush and emerging forests. Also, the state forests that were planted decades before began maturing and reaching climax stages. As these land changes occurred, habitat that once supported such abundant species as pheasant, grouse and rabbit began to disappear, being replaced by that which was more favorable to deer and the recently introduced wild turkey. As local employment opportunities peaked, leading up to and into the '60s, the profiles of residents gradually changed from predominately those originating from and remaining active farming residents to rural non-farming residents. Then, as employment opportunities declined and taxes rose, fewer residents could afford the luxury of large acreage ownership, and residential plot sizes began to decrease.