This is from the "figures don't lie" department – in this case, the department is the Dept. of Environmental Conservation, and the figures are the annual hunting, fishing and trapping license sales since 2002. Simply put, those figures have been declining, and the question begging to be asked is why, and what can be done? It would be easy to lay the blame on the fact that fewer New Yorkers are hunting, especially younger residents. But how would one account for the fact that fishing license sales have also been steadily declining?

During the 2002-03 license year, 2,033,341 licenses were sold for a total fee income to the state of $43M. Just three years later 1,822,104 were sold, totaling less than $40M. And so far for the 2006-07 license year, which began on Oct. 1, 2006, the total license sales are lagging even more, only about 1.4 million having been sold as of the end of January. Ironically, trapping license sales were the only ones to increase, jumping from around 11,000 in '02 to almost 13,000 so far this year.