The year 2025 seems to bear a greater significance as the final calendar page turns up, and the collection of the last 12 months hits the circular file and a new dozen pages of outdoor photos, pheasant dogs, and big bucks go on the various walls in my home and office. It’s the fourth-of-the-way signpost marking a turn in this new century, which has been loaded with challenges and opportunities, technologies and increased importance on how to get away from them at times. With the quarter century mark upon us this week in the outdoors as well, it’s a good time to look back on the top events, trends,
tech and tactics which have shaped hunting and fishing, success in the outdoors and what the next 25 years might bring as a result.
5. Phone Home. Where I used to chastise anyone who brought a cell phone into my boat for the constant buzzing of text notices in their jean pockets or the annoying ring of someone calling in with something allegedly important, phones have now become part-and-parcel with the outdoor experience. There are sonar units that display depths and fish on phones via Bluetooth, and the GPS hunting map – and GPS units altogether – have been gobbled up by apps and the modern smartphone. Fishing logs, weather reports, bite predictions and more all pop up in an endless scroll of push notices, and it
isn’t uncommon to have near instantaneous pics of deer moving into a hunting area thanks to cellular trail cameras. Which brings us to the next item.
4. Trail Camera Technology. Many summer evenings not spent in a boat fishing bass or walleyes were highlighted by the swapping of memory cards while swatting mosquitoes as I went in and out of my future hunting sites for each upcoming deer season. SD cards in those cameras got smaller as their capacities got larger and matched the growing power of trail camera lenses capable of snapping 20-, then 32- then 40-megapixel photos that not only provided detailed depictions of the tines on a velvet buck’s head, but also let you count his whiskers if you wanted. Add in HD quality video bursts, and everything a hunter needed to know about his or her quarry was on that card, and now, on a phone or in an inbox thanks to cellular abilities in many trail camera models. With that has come the great debate as to how much information – and instantaneous knowledge of deer movement – impacts the concept of fair chase. That debate of such immediate and accurate viewing of the outdoor world is no longer limited to deer, either.
3. Side Glances. The sonar affixed to my first boat in 2001 was a gray LCD screen Eagle 300 TX. The scrolling display boasted information from three cone angles and promised to pick up fish from a wider area around my boat. Since then, many units have come and gone on my craft and in the market which has exploded with options that now include live side-scanning sonar that can be spun in 360 degrees, displaying the silhouettes of fish within 100 feet of the boat, or from a position on the ice. Some decry the advancements in live sonar and its ability to pick out a fish as cheating – much as many did with the first Vexilar for ice angling, or spot lock on a trolling motor, or many other angling advancements when they came out – as it allows folks to lock in and track fish with great ease both on the ice and in open water. In the end though,
these units can’t catch the fish, and the ultimate challenge (and perhaps the greatest joy in angling) still remains for anglers to seal the deal with what they see on their screen and hook it into their reality. A reality, which as we all know from recent experience, shifts from year to year.
2. Hindsight is 2020. Take 2020 for example. No other year has changed our views and highlighted the importance of the outdoors and all we do in it than the year the world stood still. The impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic were far reaching medically, economically, sociologically, psychologically, and particularly in the outdoors. No other 12 month span in the last 25 years highlighted the importance of open spaces, access to waters, and availability of hunting opportunities as we sought to save our sanity and crush the curve at the same time. During the pandemic, more sportsmen and women ventured out to hunt or fish than in any other year since the new century began, and a renewed importance on those opportunities and the places which provide them was one silver lining in a gray cloud that killed more than a million people in the U.S. and likely
totals of 8 million or more worldwide. It was during that event that many reactivated sportsmen and women realized too that those places they sought weren’t as numerous or as productive as in the years before.
1. The Rise and Fall of CRP. Perhaps the biggest factor impacting hunting in the last 25 years has been the amazing increase and relatively sudden removal of conservation reserve program acres. From the towering height of nearly 32 million acres nationwide enrolled in the federal set-aside program in the early 2000s, which idled typically marginal and unproductive farmlands for grass plantings which harbored upland game, waterfowl, deer, furbearers and watchable wildlife, hunters found success unrivaled since the era around World War Two. In North Dakota, a hunter could get up to four deer tags to be used during the rifle season, and licenses hovered around 100,000 for a state with just 650,000 people at the time. The sky above any grassy area in the pheasant range turned from blue to black as flocks of pheasants took flight from the abundant cover. It was the best of times. But changes in the agricultural market, and the increased demand for ethanol and other
biofuels, as well as a growing food demand out-competed the payments offered for the idling of these acres, and unproductive lands were seeded, sprayed, and prayed over, in hopes of a good year producing a bump in a harvest which was subject to heightened commodity prices. As the demand for production shifted, grasslands were tilled, sloughs were burned and tiled, and hunters found themselves a decade or so later scrambling to access what huntable habitat is left. In place of those government programs, conservation groups and state agencies are aligning for a new reality, where privately funded plans look to fill the void, and the gap of millions of acres of huntable habitat compared to when the century began. This shift, by far, is the greatest change the last 25 years has seen, and sets the stage for the next quarter century…in our
outdoors.
Our Outdoors: Five for Twenty-Five
By Nick Simonson
Simonson is the lead writer and editor of Dakota Edge Outdoors.