Mentoring: The Joy of Passing on Our Waterfowling Heritage
By Delta President, Rob Olson
Few things as a waterfowler will give you more long-term satisfaction than passing on our hunting heritage to your son or daughter, friend or family member. Even the young kid down the street you barely even know.
At Delta, we take immense pride in mentoring new waterfowlers. I personally derive more pleasure watching a complete novice shoot his or her first duck than actually hunting myself. Ear-to-ear grins tend to make a mentor's small sacrifices completely worthwhile.
When it's waterfowl-hunting season, Delta staffers and volunteers are busy introducing newcomers to the glories of waterfowl hunting.
Delta's mentored hunting program is part of a larger initiative to recruit and retain waterfowl hunters. It's called First Hunt, our way of addressing declining hunter participation across North America.
Over the last decade, Delta Waterfowl's mentored hunts and hunting skills days have introduced countless men, women and children to our rich waterfowl-hunting culture. Our experience has taught us a lot, and now we've designed a program that we believe will give interested hunters (old and new) the educational tools they need to become the best mentors they can be.
Such help is needed today more than ever.
Why, you ask?
Because the latest statistics on hunter participation paint a grim portrait: from 2001 to 2006, U.S. waterfowl-hunter numbers dropped a whopping 27 percent. In Canada, roughly 70 percent of waterfowl hunters have left the heritage since 1978. The average age of waterfowl hunters in both countries hovers around 57 years old – this must change.
Participant Manual |
Mentor Handbook |
If we don't shore up hunting participation, and soon, the hunter-generated conservation dollars (hunting license and stamp fees, excise taxes on equipment, etc.) that prime the pump for habitat work will dry up. And if those dollars do in fact dry up, or even slow to a trickle, we could be staring down the barrel of a full-blown conservation crisis. Moreover…this heritage is too grand, too wonderful and too important to our social fabric in North America to allow urbanization to continue to erode it. Not on our watch.
Shoring up hunter participation won't be easy, but it can be done. The problem is a complicated sociological puzzle with no silver bullets or magic antidotes. Demographic and social changes seem to be conspiring against hunter participation at every turn. For example, the demographic trends responsible for the decline in hunter numbers are the same reasons they're not likely to rebound any time soon—the aging of the baby boom generation, urbanization and the declining proportion of the population of rural males.
But our research (not to mention our long tenure putting on mentored hunts) has taught us that we can successfully target non-traditional demographics: adult women, university students and even entire families. And the same disconnections to the natural world – and hunting – stemming from urbanization, have created an unforeseen opportunity: urbanites are craving something real and looking for ways to gather their own fresh, organic, local meat. Have we got a deal for them!
Bottom line: We need more mentors, and this handbook is one step in making that necessity become a reality. Consider this an invitation to change someone's life and to secure a personal legacy that is unsurpassed for hunters like you and I. If you're willing to be a mentor, we're willing to help you become the best one you can be. Won't you join us?
Rob Olson
Delta Waterfowl President