× Expand Todd Hubler

On a cloudy Friday afternoon in April, I drive through the drizzle a half hour south of Madison to the Brooklyn Wildlife Area . I stop my car at all eight small, gravel parking areas that rim the 3,000-acre public preserve and walk in several hundred yards looking for just the spot. I’m scouting turkeys.

Just the spot is a place that meets the needs of both bird and man. It’s a spot with a mix of trees and open area, which means it has places for turkeys to roost and to find food. But, to satisfy my needs as a hunter, it has to also be a spot where I can put up my portable blind with my back to a tree and some brush on two sides to make me relatively invisible. And, to satisfy my needs as a would-be recluse, it has to be far enough from the highway not to hear the traffic, and far enough from the grassy road leading into the preserve not to see people who might be walking their dogs, or bird watching or just hiking.

About 200 yards down a narrow path from the very last parking area (wouldn’t you know it) I find my place in the hunting universe. I unpack my stuff — a portable retractable blind made of camouflage material, a low chair, and a decoy that looks for all the world like a tom turkey. I set up the blind and stick the decoy in a grassy opening about 15 yards away. I sit down and pull out my new set of turkey calls and try my hand at making the sounds that turkey hens make when they are in the mood for love.

But I’m just scouting, so I’m not carrying a gun. And that, as we will see, makes all the difference.

The very next morning I get up early and drive to that very same spot and set up my blind in just exactly the same way. I pull out my turkey calls and start to make overtures to male turkeys in the hopes of attracting them to their deaths with the promise of romance, a mixture of pleasure and pain not unfamiliar to any species when it comes to reproductive rituals.

Only this time I’m carrying a shotgun. The very presence of the weapon brings with it certain responsibilities, not the least of which is the requirement of a hunting license. I paid about $20 for the license and necessary turkey stamp, for the privilege of holding a gun sitting in exactly the same posture and in exactly the same space I had occupied just 15 hours earlier; but when unarmed, I was not obligated to pay a dime.

And here is another relevant fact. I am a 58-year-old white guy, which puts me smack dab in the middle of the demographic that likes to trick turkeys into the sights of their shot guns. And next year we’ll all be 59.

Follow the money

Historically, the lion’s share of funding for purchasing, protecting and managing public land has come from people who hunt and fish. For the most part, they pay in two ways. First, they pay a federal excise tax on firearms, ammunition, archery and fishing equipment. Under the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act and the Dingell-Johnson Sport Fish Restoration Act, funds are apportioned back to the states for purchase or lease of hunting lands, for fish and game research and for education programs related to hunting and fishing.

And second, they pay through those state license fees. So, my turkey license/stamp cost a little over $20, my fishing license cost me $20 plus another $10 for a trout stamp (“stamp” revenues go directly to support the game you are trying to kill) and, in the fall, my deer license will run me $24. These are all resident fees; non-residents pay substantially more ($58 for the privilege of hunting turkeys, $50 for a fishing license and $158 to hunt deer with a gun).

All told, these license fees bring in about $65 million each year, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. The revenue is put in the Fish and Wildlife Account, which funds things like game wardens who enforce fish and wildlife rules; management of the state’s wild deer herd; the stocking of game fish in rivers and lakes; research into all kinds of issues related to the management of game and nongame species; habitat restoratio; and even things not directly related to hunting and fishing, like bald eagle counts.

Overall, about two-thirds of funding for fish and wildlife management comes from hunting and fishing licenses, while about 25 percent comes from federal excise taxes, and the rest from donations and grants and miscellaneous sources.

This is separate from the Parks Account, which is funded from the park vehicle sticker you might buy for $28 or the daily campsite fee you might spend $15 or $20 on or the trail pass you might buy for $25. These and other parks-related fees generate about $19 million a year, according to the fiscal bureau — or less than one-third of the revenue that comes from hunting and fishing licenses. The legislature’s Joint Finance Committee has just voted to, again, increase those fees for next year.

And parks make up a relatively small slice of the whole state conservation land portfolio. State parks, supported by park user fees, cover about 170,000 acres while state forests, natural areas and fish and wildlife areas, supported mostly by those who buy hunting and fishing licenses, cover about 1.3 million acres.

So here is the fundamental problem. As a rule, you must pay a fee to use a state park or trail while use of state wildlife, forests and natural areas is free as long as you are not hunting or fishing. So people can enjoy these public lands and waters for hiking, bird-watching, photography, canoeing and kayaking, or other “non-consumptive” activities and pay nothing for the visit, while a hunter can enjoy the very same property in much the same way, kill nothing that day, but pay for the cost of everyone’s enjoyment and all of the other public benefits that go with keeping lands and waters natural, free and clean.

And as a society we are doing more watching of wildlife than shooting at it. How to pay for the management of the places we love, when how we love them is changing, is an emerging dilemma. State policymakers seem determined to move in an unpromising direction.

Tales of the old hunters

Tom Hauge is a widely respected recently retired DNR official. Trained as a wildlife biologist, Hauge led the department’s Bureau of Wildlife Management for 25 years before leaving the agency last year rather than accepting an unexpected demotion. While Hauge says little about the situation, those who worked with him inside and outside the department lamented his departure.

Hauge knows how to speak, “Wisconsin Guy.”

“Deer hunting is to wildlife management what Badgers football is to the rest of the athletic program,” Hauge says, referring to the big program’s revenues that end up supporting all of the other non-revenue producing sports. “It funds the basic infrastructure of wildlife management.”

And that is a problem because deer hunting license sales are declining. In 2011 the UW-Madison’s Applied Population Lab oratory partnered with the Department of Natural Resources to document what had been not-so-casually observed for the last decade or so: the aging of the average Wisconsin deer hunter.

The report projected that gun deer hunting license sales would decline from about 600,000 in 2000 to 400,000 by 2030. And because deer hunting licenses make up the single biggest portion of revenues that go into the Fish and Wildlife account, that presents a huge problem for the management of natural resources in the state.

The main reason for the current decline is a stark reduction in the number of kids taking up the sport.

But in the long run the even bigger problem will be baby boomers. That demographic, of which I am a part, is currently making things look less bleak than they actually are. That’s because we show every sign of staying healthy and relatively well-off, and we are projected to stick with our sport longer into our dotage than previous generations. But once boomers start to migrate to the big Woodstock in the sky, the report projects deer hunter numbers will nose dive due to the smaller and less outdoor-oriented generations behind us.

The trend goes beyond deer hunting. A similar precipitous drop off is occurring in small game licenses while participation rates for turkey hunting and fishing are stable at best or somewhat declining.

Hauge says we are already seeing the effects of reduced revenue. “During my tenure we had a continuously long backlog of property habitat and recreational projects awaiting funding – likely a couple of million dollars worth…. We also struggle to keep up the recreational infrastructure on many properties. On wildlife areas, this includes hiking trails, dog training areas and access trails. While less sexy, we struggled to find funding to put up basic machine sheds where we could protect equipment from the weather and do basic maintenance work.”

Due to budget reductions, he adds, the bureau last year had about as many full time equivalent positions as it had in the 1960s when the state owned much less land. He says that the agency is also relying increasingly on limited-term employees who often are not able to develop the long-term relationships and institutional knowledge that are important in land management.

With less revenue and fewer managers onsite, he predicts that signage will fall into disrepair, trails won’t be maintained and there will be less management of invasive plant species. A January 2017 revenue report by the DNR to the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee indicates that about 2,000 acres of wetland habitat has been left unmanaged due to lack of staff and funding. On the wildlife side of things, 25 counties don’t have a resident wildlife biologist. Says Hauge: “That stretches remaining staff pretty thin across the landscape.”

Doubling down on a losing bet

So far, the state strategy to stem the tide in declining resources has been to try to reverse the demographic trends by encouraging more people to get into hunting and fishing.

And, in fact, female participation rates in deer hunting are increasing, but not at a rate that suggests that they can come anywhere near to matching the decline in male hunters.

The department’s own 2016 report states just that. “Efforts to recruit new participants in hunting and fishing can transmit heritage values to the next generation, but thus far there is little evidence that such efforts have had any effect on reversing the observed and predicted trends (in participation declines),” wrote the professionals in the DNR’s Social Science Services Section.

In fact, use of public lands is trending away from consumptive uses. In a 2011 report on outdoor recreation trends, the DNR listed 72 activities that Wisconsinites identified participating in. “Walk for pleasure,” was the top activity with almost 88 percent participation of state residents. The first consumptive activity that shows up on the list is at number 17 and that is mushroom and berry picking. Fishing arrives at number 22 and hunting at 38.

That same report noted that, “The challenge for recreation providers is to understand the ever-changing needs of the outdoor recreation public.”

According to a 2016 DNR public survey , 51 percent of Wisconsin residents support “creating a mechanism whereby all residents pay something for fish and wildlife management.” That included an especially strong 64 percent support among wildlife viewers who currently must pay nothing.

But current policy makers seem to be having none of it. In the last state budget, Gov. Scott Walker ended all general fund support for state parks, requiring them to fund themselves through user fees or other means. When, early this year, the DNR issued its report outlining a menu of hunting and fishing fee increases, Assembly Natural Resources Committee Chair Joel Kleefisch rejected it outright and said that the DNR should instead do what it’s doing already with only limited success — try to recruit more hunters and anglers.

And since taking power in 2011, Republicans have four times cut the state Stewardship Fund, which acquires land for all kinds of outdoor recreation through general fund supported borrowing. A recent proposal by Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) would essentially wipe out the fund altogether and transfer the money to a scholarship program aimed at keeping the best high school students in Wisconsin for college. This, despite the fact that DNR surveys find that one important reason that hunters quit is frustration in finding room on public lands.

So, in short, while the public recognizes the broad benefits of protecting and managing conservation lands and seems willing to pay for it, the governor and Legislature are moving in the opposite direction. And in the case of hunting and fishing, their answer is to double down on a base of customers whose ranks seem destined to diminish with time.

The way forward

If replacing the revenues being lost to hunter attrition through recruitment of new hunters seems unlikely to work, and if more general taxpayer support isn’t in the cards right now, what are the other options?

Experiences in the adjoining states of Michigan and Minnesota hold two possibilities.

When I am not shooting turkeys in Wisconsin I am not shooting something else in Michigan, where my wife and I own a cabin. But in Michigan, before I even have the privilege of paying more for an out-of-state resident’s license, I have to buy a “sport card.” In fact, everybody who wants to hunt, fish or use trails in Michigan — state resident or not — must buy that card. It costs only one dollar, but it raises about $220,000 each year. Some of the Wisconsin natural resource professionals I spoke with suggested that a similar card could be used in Wisconsin, but applied to anyone who wanted to gain access to public land for any purpose.

In 2008 Minnesota citizens passed a referendum creating the Minnesota Legacy Fund, a .375 percent special sales tax. These revenues are divided up into an Arts and Culture Fund and four more funds related to natural resources: Clean Water, Environment and Natural Resources, Outdoor Heritage, and Parks and Trails.

The Outdoor Heritage Fund is the one that would most affect a place like my turkey hunting grounds at the Brooklyn Wildlife Refuge. That fund receives $80 million — more than all the revenue currently raised from hunting and fishing licenses in Wisconsin — to, in the language of the Minnesota law, “restore, protect, and enhance wetlands, prairies, forests and habitat for fish, game and wildlife.”

But even Mike McFadzen, the policy chair of Friends of Wisconsin State Parks , admits that a special sales tax “won’t play well in Wisconsin.” His group supports returning to more general fund support for parks and recreation areas. And McFadzen, who also represents cross-country skiers on the State Trails Council, is also willing to look at new or increased fees for specific user groups like skiers.

If McFadzen represents non-consumptive users, then Larry Bonde most definitely represents consumptive ones. Bonde is chair of the revered Conservation Congress, a group established in state law to help guide hunting and fishing regulations. But Bonde essentially agrees with McFadzen that general purpose revenues should be an option.

“While recruitment efforts [into hunting and fishing] are important,” he says, “everything is suggesting we cannot recruit our way out of this problem.”

Bonde seems to be right, unless the focus of recruitment is not hunting but other uses and new users.

James Edward Mills is a journalist, author, producer and outdoorsman. Mills, who is black, has written The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors. The book chronicles the first all-African American attempt to reach the summit of Denali, but it also explores the relationship of Americans to nature.

“The fundamental problem facing outdoor recreation today is how to make it more interesting and engaging for an audience that statistically spends less time in nature than their white counterparts,” Mills says.

Perhaps the answer to declining rates of hunting is not just to get younger and more diverse people into those activities, but also to get more people outdoors doing things besides shooting at stuff.

Mills has two suggestions to help that along. He says that outdoor recreation opportunities have to be accessible, and everyone needs to feel welcome.

“I was hiking a section of the Ice Age Trail and I learned that, due to budget cuts, a campsite at Brunet Island State Park would close soon,” Mills says. “My point is that these resources need to be supported and maintained. If public land isn’t there for people to use, all the interest in the world is irrelevant.”

He also supports making these settings “culturally relevant by normalizing the behavior of spending time in nature.” He points to ads from Subaru and Toyota that depict African Americans camping. “This is a very small, but positive, step toward making underrepresented people feel welcome in the outdoors.” He suggests a similar campaign for the DNR.

So while Wisconsin’s natural heritage was preserved and restored by generations of hunters and fishers who were predominantly white men, like me, it might only survive into the future if a more diverse group of users joins them in the field and for different reasons. The land will still be there, but the people who use and care for it will have to change.

Hauge sums it up best. “Conservation isn’t a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or Green thing. It’s just something we need to do well for the quality of life we enjoy in Wisconsin. The outdoors is a big part of who we are.”