What percentage of hunters are actually buying a license? Even if every single person bought one that was legally required to would it be over 50% if the hunting population? I am seriously asking. Seems I remember a number of around 180,000 license holders last year. Are there 250, 300, 500,000 hunters in Alabama?
I think that just surveying licensed hunters would be plenty to meet our needs. The trend line that we’re really looking at over time is the average number of deer killed per hunter and how it changes. If you remember back to our mock survey on here that number was around 0.8 bucks per hunter and 0.7 does for last season. You look at that number over time and see if it’s generally decreasing, increasing, or staying the same. You don’t have to survey all of the other hunters to see this. You can just look at licensed deer hunters and see if they are killing less deer per hunter over time..... more....or about the same.
