In the hunt

Deer season opens in Arkansas on Saturday, and the Morning News had a good story about hunting. It's still enormously popular in Arkansas, but the ranks of hunters are starting to decline as lifestyles change around the state, and that's a trend familiar to other Southern states.

Those first shafts of sunlight will glisten off the guns of 250,000 hunters when dawn breaks over Arkansas on the opening day of deer season Saturday.

That's five times more people carrying firearms than the number of soldiers in the Civil War battles of Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove combined. The legion of hunters makes opening day of deer season among the largest one-day events in the state.

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The sale of resident hunting licenses has gradually declined in the last five years.

"We're concerned about it but not overly concerned. It's a national trend," Henderson said. Arkansas has a strong hunting tradition, Henderson said, but hunting isn't as important in most people's lives as it was when he was a youth.

He ranked the health of the sport in Arkansas "somewhere between holding its own and thriving."

"Access to places to hunt is our biggest challenge," he said. Development of rural land for homes and businesses shrinks acreage for wildlife and for hunting. People own smaller tracts of land than they once did.