This is a bit off topic, but I keep reading how hunter numbers are steadily declining in the US. I am sure that it is true compared to the overall US population, but it seems odd since every year there are more and more hunters in the woods. Every bend in a Forest Service road seems to have a camper and UTV trailer these days during the general deer/elk seasons. Draw odds for hunts gets poorer every year too, even in units where tag numbers do not go down.
Please don't take this as nothing but a complaint. All a guy has to do is step a few feet off a road or main trail to be by himself during the season and I rarely fail to notch a tag if I put effort into it, but it is something I often wonder about. This last season, I climbed way the hell up to a peak in the Wyoming Range during the general deer hunt and counted something like 150 campers in the valley below and all the people around them had orange on. I saw plenty of deer and got a good 4x4, but I have a hard time understanding how hunter numbers are getting lower and lower. When I was a kid we'd see maybe 2-3 camps along those kind of Forest Service roads.
For what it is worth, in WY, MT and ID at least, I rarely see an AR in the hunting woods. Lots of people coyote hunt with them, but not deer/elk.
Very different in Nebraska.
Nebraska has very little public land and unless you own land that is suited to hunting or have family/friend access to land that is suited to hunting you are pretty much out of luck. I doubt that I see more than a dozen or so deer or turkey hunters each year when I'm afield. I think that I've encountered one other squirrel hunter during the 30 years that I hunted fox squirrels here, even on public WMAs. If there was more hunting land that was easier to access, I think that there would be more hunters here.
