For generations, October has been a welcome, if busy, month for hunters seeking recreation in the woods and fields of East Texas.
But the focus of his interest and enthusiasm has undergone a dramatic, ongoing, and transformative shift over the past four decades. Most of those hunters have moved away from the quarry that their ancestors and many of them younger saw as their main game of choice: small game hunting; squirrels, in particular, but also rabbits, to white-tailed deer, a species of big game that commands a growing percentage of the nation’s hunter interest.
This change has seen a large segment of the hunting community abandon or simply omit what has long been the foundational activity on which the region’s hunters built their skills, the craft of wood and cemented connections with the land, its wildlife and its culture and society. history.
TOMPKINS: Five Things You Need to Know About Squirrel Hunting in Texas
Participation in small game hunting, specifically squirrels and rabbits, has plummeted in Texas (and nationally) over the last four decades. The numbers are staggering and reflect a long-term shift in the demographics of hunters in Texas and the nation.
The number of hunters chasing squirrels in Texas in 1981 was estimated at nearly a quarter million, 231,000, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s annual survey of small game that year. Nearly all of those hunters were in East Texas, most in the densely forested, squirrel-rich Pineywoods Ecoregion in the far east of the state, and a smaller number in the adjacent Post Oak Savanna.
There, squirrel hunting was a long-standing tradition, with the annual opening of squirrel season on October 1 in eastern Texas counties seen as the de facto opening of fall hunting seasons. Squirrels were by far the most popular game in the eastern part of the state, attracting more than twice as many hunters in 1981 as white-tailed deer.
And there were many squirrels and many places and opportunities to hunt them.
The lowland forests of the region, with their oak, hickory, and other mast-producing trees and adjacent terraces with tangles of brambles and berry vines and other berry, fruit, and other soft mast-producing vegetation, were ideal habitat for the gray squirrels, invariably called “cat”. squirrels by east texans. They shared the region with their fox-squirrel cousins, a slightly larger species that prefers the more open magnolia and beech forests of the adjacent uplands.
RELATED: Classic Hunting Gear That Still Stands The Test Of Time
Squirrel hunting has been a rite and ritual for generations of East Texans. The initial hunting experiences of most East Texans consisted of chasing squirrels, often under the tutelage of parents, grandparents, or other elderly relatives. This mentorship allowed novice hunters to learn from more experienced hunters who passed on their knowledge. That knowledge includes how to move silently through the forest, the behavior of their prey – which trees the squirrels prefer, their evasive tactics, when they are most active – when to shoot and when to wait for a better opportunity, how to read a landscape and find their way. in thick woods and all the other skills that are required to develop a competent, confident and skillful hunter with a rifle or shotgun, comfortable and self-sufficient when alone in the woods.
Those basic hunting and woodcraft skills translate to just about any other kind of hunting. A skilled squirrel hunter is a good squirrel hunter, period.
And while most squirrel hunters eventually branched out to pursue other species, most remained squirrel hunters throughout their lives, relishing the challenge of continuing to hunt squirrels in cathedral-like lowland forests or navigating upland forests. high, trying to get to where a “squirrel dog” – invariably a feist or cur or rat/fox terrier – stands with its front paws as high as it can reach on a tree trunk and barks “tree!”
And, of course, there are the fruits of the hunt. A young cat squirrel quartered and fried in a cast-iron skillet and served with gravy and crackers or an older squirrel slow-cooked until tender in a pot of squirrel and meatballs have graced countless East Texas tables.
But they are honoring them less and less, these days.
The great shift away from squirrel hunting in East Texas began in the 1960s and 1970s with the resurgence of white-tailed deer populations in the region. Nearly extirpated in eastern Texas in the 1920s due to habitat loss and unregulated hunting, whitetails began to make a comeback through a combination of repopulation, vigorous hunting enforcement, and a change in the East Texas landscape that benefited deer and, in many cases, negatively affected squirrels
The move to uniform management of commercial pine forests – clearcutting – created a matrix of forest, “edge” habitat, and early successional vegetation, such as grasses and shrubs that deer relish. Deer populations grew, and with it the interest in deer hunting. Changes in land use, including land leasing, changes in land ownership, the fading of small farms, and other factors, encouraged an increased focus on deer.
As interest in deer hunting grew in East Texas, participation in squirrel hunting declined. Increasingly, squirrel hunting was discouraged or even prohibited in some hunting contracts due to conflicts with deer hunting on the same property. And many hunters simply chose to spend their days in the field chasing deer instead of squirrels.
MORE: River flooding spoils main fishing period
In 1978, some 92,000 hunters hunted deer in the Pineywoods region of East Texas, with a quarter of a million hunting squirrels.
In the early 1990s, those numbers were about the same, around 100,000.
By the year 2000, the number of squirrel hunters statewide had dropped to about 70,000.
Last hunting season, about 121,500 of Texas’ 837,000 whitetail deer hunters sat in booths in the Pineywoods, according to TPWD’s annual survey. The number of squirrel hunters for the 2017-18 season was estimated at just under 48,000, with a vast majority of them in the Pineywoods and Post Oak Savanna regions.
The decline in Texas squirrel hunters mirrors a similar decline nationwide in small game hunters. The number of people hunting small game in the United States fell from 7.6 million in 1991 to 3.5 million in 2016, according to the most recent survey of hunting participation by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Joined.
The decline can also be seen in the number of Texas hunters going after rabbits, the state’s other leading small game animal. Texas had nearly 210,000 rabbit hunters in 1981. This past hunting season, approximately 44,000 Texans hunted rabbits, a decline of nearly 80 percent in 35 years.
The decline in small game hunters has drawn the attention of wildlife managers who understand the value of small game in recruiting and educating new hunters and the threat that declining hunter numbers pose to overall wildlife management. wild life; hunters fund nearly all wildlife management, restoration, and research through license fees and federal excise taxes on hunting-related equipment.
Texas wildlife managers have made efforts to encourage small game hunting. In 2014, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission adopted a change in hunting regulations that extended the length of the fall/winter squirrel season in East Texas by up to three weeks, moving the traditional closing date of the first Sunday of February to the last Sunday. Of the month. The measure adds hunting season days during a time when the general deer season is closed in the 51 East Texas counties that have the fall season and where the majority of squirrel hunting occurs. This gives squirrel hunters more opportunities to hunt when they will not be in potential conflict with deer hunters.
Even with that move, it’s questionable whether the extra days will result in more Texans participating in the squirrel hunt.
But for those heading to the East Texas lowlands in search of plenty of cat squirrels, the prospects this year are good. Squirrel numbers in the eastern third of the state are up this year, and a generally strong acorn crop should mean good numbers of fat, young squirrels.
So a hunter who puts on a pair of rubber boots, grabs a .22 rifle (Grandpa’s Winchester model 61 pump would be a good fit), slips on an oak floor along an East Texas canal on a late October or early November morning and snuggle up against a large tupelo within range of a huge ancient “burrowing tree” and you should have a good chance of spotting a cat squirrel or two wriggling like ghosts through the branches .
What that Texas squirrel hunter will most likely not see is another squirrel hunter.