DES MOINES, Iowa (KELO.com) — Iowa has continued to see sharp increases in hunting and fishing license sales as residents look for safe activities during the coronavirus pandemic.
In the future, that will mean more hunters, more fishing enthusiasts, and more money to expand public land holdings, said Jared Wiklund, spokesman for St. Paul-based nonprofit Pheasants Forever. So will the recently signed Great American Outdoors Act, which provides $1.9 billion a year for public lands and other projects.
Wiklund said Iowa is part of a national trend, fueled by the pandemic, which has brought many more people outside for socially distanced recreation.
“People are reconnecting with the land,” Wiklund said. “This absolutely will be long-term, because the more people buy licenses, the more money there is for public land. The more public land there is, the more people want to be outside.”
“We are seeing a huge influx of people getting outdoors,” Wiklund said.
Many are there for recreation, but some are hunting because they need the food. “People are worried about food supplies,” Wiklund said. “That’s part of it, too.”
The trend is national, Wiklund said, and clear in the Midwest. As the pandemic spread in May, Minnesota had already had seen a 41% increase in fishing license sales, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported.
Tyler Stubbs of Bondurant, who works on urban fisheries programs for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said he has one clear bit of anectodal evidence of the boom.
“The ponds I thought were secret spots aren’t secret anymore,” Stubbs said with a chuckle. “It’s rare to show up to any pond in Des Moines and not see people already fishing,” he added.
The Des Moines metro alone has 100 public ponds, Stubbs said. With people working at home, and many of them gaining an hour or so of free time every day by not commuting to work, more people have grabbed a rod and headed for the lakes and ponds, he added.
The jump in Iowa license sales that the Iowa Department of Natural Resources saw earlier this year has continued.
Sales of all types of fishing licenses and stamps are up 33% year to date over the same period last year, with 368,283 sales vs. 277,494 last year, state records show.
The largest category of sales, resident fishing licenses, jumped by 37% year-to-date, to 240,219 from 174,988.
A fair number of anglers apparently are going after trout, which are regularly stocked in northeast Iowa streams and naturally reproduce in some of them.
Through late August, 43,336 residents had paid the special fee to fish for trout, up 25% from the 34,693 in the same period last year. Nonresident trout stamp sales were up 20%.
Then there are those who just wanted a quick fishing outing, and maybe tried fishing for the first time. Sales of resident one-day fishing licenses are up 33%, and resident seven-day licenses rose 24%.
On the hunting side of things, turkey hunters bought 59,730 licenses through late August, up 24% from 48,261 in that period a year ago.
It paid off.
Last year, Iowa hunters killed 11,390 turkeys in the spring turkey season, with the highest numbers in the extreme northeast corner of the state. This year, that number grew to 14,666, a gain of 29% and a new record. .
It was only the second time since 2007 that the number of turkeys bagged in the spring season topped 12,000. In 2016, hunters killed 12,173 turkeys in the spring.
Overall, Iowans have bought 66% more basic hunting licenses, and sales of the combination hunting license and habitat stamp are up 15%.
That’s a lot of social distancing.
(Perry Beeman with the Iowa Capital Digest contributed this report. It first appeared in the ICD here. It is used with permission.)
