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.
The problem with this was the vast majority of these were small road frontage plots, leaving the acreage behind them less desirable and often landlocked. Today we see its effect, as most rural roads are lined with residences, while the lands behind them are overgrown with brush and overabundant and emerging tree growth. Their primary value being for recreation or off-road cluster housing development.
Because of the limited access to these off-road lands, coupled with safety issues, the available land for hunting has shrunk and continues to shrink, despite the habitat there supporting sufficient game species numbers to easily provide hunting opportunities. This has and is still causing depredation problems for the residents, as deer and other wildlife species, left unmanaged, become destructive pests. And since a higher percentage of today's residents have never hunted or desired to, the problem will only get worse.
As the number of black bears and damages by them increases in our area, even if the State opts to eventually allow bear hunting, it's very doubtful enough non-hunting landowners will allow hunting for it to be an effective management tool. It certainly hasn't been the case with deer in the most problematic areas, almost all of them.being in areas where little or no hunting has been or is being done. And black bears are even more elusive and skilled at avoiding hunted areas and seeking out "safe" areas than deer are.
Within the demographic changes, there's also the age factor. Lifelong hunters are aging as a group, and progressively fewer young people are hunting. The decreasing access to huntable private lands, coupled with hunters aging and being less prone to spending as much time afield as they did when they were younger, translates to less effective management of prolific wildlife species. Land ownership in our region is also affected by the age factor, as fewer young people opt to live here and own property because of the poorer job opportunities while increasingly more retired people from near large urban areas are relocating here for the scenic and rural atmosphere and less expensive property prices.
Our area is in a transition, where paradoxes are increasingly evident. A drive along rural roads that were once dominated by active farmlands now reveals a mixture of modest and even dilapidated residences, often punctuated by large and expensive residences. The latter ones are often recently constructed by relocated owners from near urban areas, who've retired, sold their previous homes, getting several times what they would have sold for here, and used the income to build a much larger residence in our area.
Where all this will lead, as it applies to the future of hunting and game and wildlife management, remains unanswered. But judging from the direction our area has been going over the past several decades, a meal of self-harvested game and home-grown vegetables is apt to be increasingly a rarity.