Squirrel hunting not as popular as it used to be in Texas

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Gray squirrels - "cat "squirrels to the generations of East Texans who learned and developed hunting skills and woodscraft while pursuing the highly mobile, wary arboreal rodents - have been replaced by whitetail deer as the most popular game animals in the state's Pineywoods region.

Participation in squirrel hunting in East Texas, once the most popular hunting activity in the region, has steadily declined from more than a quarter-million squirrel hunters barely a generation ago to 44,000 this past year, a result of changes in the region's landscape, landownership, culture and demographics.

Participation in squirrel hunting in East Texas, once the most popular hunting activity in the region, has steadily declined from more than a quarter-million squirrel hunters barely a generation ago to 44,000 this past year, a result of changes in the region's landscape, landownership, culture and demographics.

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October has for generations been a most welcomed, if busy, month for hunters who pursue their recreation in the forests and fields of eastern Texas.

But the focus of their interest and enthusiasm has taken a dramatic, continuing and transformative shift over the past four decades. Most of those hunters have moved away from the quarry their ancestors and many of their younger selves saw as their primary game of choice - small game; squirrels, particularly, but rabbits, too - to white-tailed deer, a big-game species that dominates an increasing percentage of the nation's hunters’ interest.

This shift has seen a large segment of the hunting community abandon or simply skip what long has been the foundational activity on which the region's hunters built their skills, woods-craft as well as cementing connections to the land, its wildlife and their cultural and social history.

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Participation in hunting small game - specifically, squirrels and rabbits - has plummeted in Texas (and nationally) over the past four decades. The numbers are startling and reflect a long-term shift in hunter demographics in Texas and the nation.

The number of hunters pursuing squirrels in Texas in 1981 was estimated at almost a quarter-million - 231,000, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's annual small-game survey from that year. Almost all of those hunters were in eastern Texas, with the majority in heavily forested, squirrel-rich Pineywoods ecological region in the far eastern portion of the state and a smaller number in the adjacent Post Oak Savanna.

There, squirrel hunting was a long-time tradition, with the annual Oct. 1 opening of squirrel season in East Texas counties seen as the de facto opening of autumn hunting seasons. Squirrels were, far and away, the most popular game animal in the eastern quarter of the state, drawing more than twice as many hunters afield in 1981 as white-tailed deer.

And there were a lot of squirrels and a lot of places and opportunity to hunt them.

The region's bottomland forests, with their oaks, hickories and other mast-producing trees and adjacent terraces with tangles of briars and berry vines and other vegetation producing berries, fruits and other soft mast, were ideal habitat for 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/beech forests of adjacent uplands.

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Squirrel hunting has been a rite and ritual for generations of East Texans. The initial hunting experiences of most East Texans involved pursuing squirrels, almost always under the tutelage of parents, grandparents or other older relatives. This mentorship allowed novice hunters to learn from more experienced hunters who passed along their knowledge. That knowledge includes how to move silently through the wood, the behavior of their quarry - which trees squirrels preferred, 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 your way in thick woods and all the other skills that go into developing a competent hunter safe and skilled with a rifle or shotgun, at ease and self-reliant when alone in the woods.

Those basic hunting and woods-craft skills translate to almost every other type of hunting. A skilled squirrel hunter is a good hunter, period.

And while most squirrel hunters eventually branched out to pursue other species, most remained squirrel hunters their entire lives, enjoying the challenge of still-hunting squirrels in cathedral-like bottomland forests or navigating uplands forest, 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 the trunk of a tree and barks "treed!"

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 biscuits or an older squirrel simmered until tender in a pot of squirrel-and-dumplings have graced untold East Texas tables.

But they are gracing them less and less, these days.

The big shift away from squirrel hunting in East Texas began in the 1960s and 1970s with the revival of white-tailed deer populations in the region. Almost extirpated in East Texas by the 1920s through loss of habitat and unregulated hunting, whitetails began to come back through a combination of restocking, vigorous enforcement of hunting regulations and a change in East Texas landscape that benefited deer and, in many cases, negatively affected squirrels.

The move to even-age management of commercial pine forests - clear-cutting - created a matrix of forest, "edge" habitat and early-succession vegetation such as the forbs and shrubs that deer savor. Deer populations boomed, and with it interest in deer hunting. Land use changes - including leasing of lands, shifts in ownership of lands, the fading of small farms and other factors - encouraged more focus on deer.

As interest in deer hunting in East Texas grew, participation in squirrel hunting declined. Increasingly, squirrel hunting was discouraged or even prohibited on some hunting leases because of conflicts with deer hunting on the same property. And many hunters simply chose to concentrate their days afield in pursuit of deer instead of squirrels.

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In 1978, an estimated 92,000 hunters hunted deer in East Texas’ Pineywoods region, with a quarter-million hunting squirrels.

By the early 1990s, those numbers were almost equal at around 100,000.

By 2000, squirrel hunter numbers, statewide, had dropped to about 70,000.

This past hunting season, about 121,500 of Texas’ 837,000 whitetail deer hunters sat in stands in the Pineywoods, according to TPWD's annual survey. Squirrel hunter numbers for the 2017-18 season were estimated at a little less than 48,000, with huge majority of them in the Pineywoods and Post Oak Savanna regions.

The decline in Texas squirrel hunters mirrors a similar nationwide decline in small-game hunters. The number of persons 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 hunting participation survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The decline also can be seen in the number of Texas hunters pursuing rabbits, the other primary small-game animal in the state. Texas held almost 210,000 rabbit hunters in 1981. This past hunting season, an estimated 44,000 Texans hunted rabbits, an almost 80 percent decline in 35 years.

The decline in hunters of small game has grabbed the attention of wildlife managers who understand the value small-game hunting has in recruiting and educating new hunters and the threat declining hunter numbers present to overall wildlife management; hunters almost holly fund all wildlife management, restoration and research though 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 as much as three weeks, moving the traditional closing date of the first Sunday in February to last Sunday of the month. The move 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 give squirrel hunters more opportunity to hunt when they won't be in potential conflict with deer hunters.

Even with that move, it is questionable whether the extra days will result in more Texans participating in squirrel hunting.

But for those who do take to an East Texas bottomland in pursuit of a mess of cat squirrels, this year's prospects 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 squirrel.

So a hunter who slips on a pair of rubber boots, grabs a .22 rifle (Grandfather's Model 61 Winchester pump would be a good choice), slips into a pin oak flat along an East Texas waterway on a late October or early November morning and snugs against a big tupelo tree within range of a massive, ancient "den tree" should stand a fine chance of seeing a cat squirrel or two snaking like ghosts among the limbs.

What that Texas squirrel hunter almost certainly won't see is another squirrel hunter.