PIERRE – The South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department is looking for a little help when it comes to creating more new hunters and they’ve partnered with a tech start-up to find it.
Late in October, GFP staff announced that the department was entering into a partnership with Powderhook, a smartphone app designed to connect people interested in learning how to hunt with people who are ready, willing and able to do just that.
“Ultimately we want to get more people in the field,” said GFP wildlife division education specialist Taniya Bethke.
The focus is squarely on recruiting more adults in the world of hunting and fishing. The lack of mentoring opportunities for adults interested in learning how to hunt is an issue that state game agencies across the country have been struggling to solve in recent years. The trend has been spurred on by a decline in the number of hunters in the country.
Nationwide licensing data collected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service every five years has shown steady declines in the number of Americans buying hunting and fishing licenses over the last few decades. The decline is expected to accelerate sometime in the next 10 years as the average age of the baby boom generation hits 65 or older. Licensing data shows that’s when hunters start to age out of the lifestyle and thus stop buying hunting licenses.
That’s a big problem for state wildlife managers because their work is funded almost entirely by hunters and anglers. License fees make up the largest portion of that funding. The wildlife division of South Dakota’s GF&P, for example, got 55.3 percent, or about $29.66 million, of its roughly $53.6 million fiscal year 2017 budget directly from hunting and fishing license fees.
Federal funds, which also largely come from hunters in the form of excise taxes on things such as guns and ammunition, made up about 40.2 percent of the wildlife division’s FY 2017 budget. The other 4.5 percent of the budget came from dedicated taxes and fees as well as miscellaneous sources.
State game agencies such as the SDGF&P do most of the nation’s science and management work when it comes to non-migratory wildlife in the United States. That includes both game and nongame species. In the U.S., a decline in hunters has real potential to mean a decline in wildlife populations.
Bethke said GFP can’t fix the problem of declining hunter numbers on its own. The department has started offering classes such as Harvest SD and Hunting 101, but those classes can only take so many people at a time and require a lot of labor on GFP’s part. They’re good efforts, Bethke said, but are limited in scope.
“You’ve got a highly labor intensive set of classes that just can’t meet the whole need,” Bethke said.
That’s one of the biggest reasons why SDGFP has partnered with a company called Powderhook, which uses a smartphone app to connect people who are interested in hunting and fishing with mentors who can help them get started either in person or through the app.
“I started Powderhook to solve the problem that I had,” said CEO Eric Dinger.
He grew up in Redfield and is originally from the Hecla area. His dad worked in agriculture and had ready access to land to hunt on, plus there was a lot of public land around, too, Dinger said. Then, his family moved to Minnesota and it got harder to find places to hunt which, in turn, meant he hunted less.
“I went from being able to hunt anywhere I wanted, to having a tough time finding places to go,” Dinger said.
Dinger now lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he founded Powderhook partly, he said, to help find more places to go hunting.
“We thought using tools and tech would help,” Dinger said.
There are a total of eight states, including South Dakota, working with Powderhook to facilitate digital mentorship for new and returning hunters. Nationwide, there are 1,400 people signed up to be mentors on the app, which is free to use. Dinger said there are mentors in all 50 states. But finding mentors isn’t the problem.
“The challenge is finding people who are interested in learning to hunt,” Dinger said.
The company makes money by building branded hunting mentorship programs and working with companies such as Federal Ammunition, which gets unlimited access to Powderhook users in exchange for funding some of the app’s programming. Organizations such as Pheasants Forever, Ducks Unlimited and the Quality Deer Management Association also work with Powderhook.
Right now SDGFP mostly is helping to promote Powderhook’s app in the state. Bethke said the department has sent news releases and launched a social media promotional campaign to help drive people to Powderhook. The goal for GFP, Bethke said, is to use Powderhook as a sort of low-cost way to gauge the level of interest South Dakota hunters have in mentoring new hunters and how many people in the state are interested in learning or re-learning hunt skills.
“If there is a need identified the next step would be training mentors,” Bethke said. “Really this whole problem could be solved if each hunter took someone with them.”
This is Powderhook’s mission. Dinger said Powderhook’s goal is to find 100,000 hunters willing to mentor 3 million new hunters by 2021. Three million is roughly the same number of hunters who quit hunting between 2011 and 2016. Many of those hunters simply got too old to keep hunting.
“It’s real life, in front of our eyes that we’re watching people age out of hunting,” Dinger said.
A link to download the Powderhook app can be found at https://powderhook.com/.
