Hunting falls prey to development
AS GROWTH OVERTAKES FORESTS, HUNTERS HAVE FEWER OPTIONS
By David Klepper
The Sun News
John Bellamy remembers days before water parks and frontage roads, when you could hunt deer at Broadway at the Beach. Before growth pushed all the good hunting grounds west of the waterway.
"I hunt whenever I can," said Bellamy, 59, of Myrtle Beach. Bellamy said he has hunted locally since he was 13. "But now I go down to Andrews."
As growth continues to transform Brunswick, Horry and Georgetown counties, subdivisions, roads and shopping centers have sprung up where forests and fields used to be. That means hunters have to travel farther to find their prey.
"You used to see more deer along the roads, and now you see big shopping centers," said Wade Long, who hunts dove and deer by bow and rifle near his home on S.C. 111.
"We used to hunt off of [S.C.] 90. Now, there are homes there."
Where subdivisions rub up against wilderness, the hunting tradition clashes with the new suburban identity.
Cathy Honeycutt sometimes sees hunters in her back yard in the Pelican Bay neighborhood near Carolina Bays Parkway in northern Horry County. Sometimes, lost hunting dogs will wander around the neighborhood. It's no wonder: She regularly sees deer, turkey and even black bears. She saw a bobcat not too long ago. Two weeks ago, she found shotgun shells on the road.
"It's all private land, and it's not supposed to be hunted on," she said. "But the hunters will walk right through. Once this guy with a shotgun was out there, and I yelled at him, and he just looked at me and said, 'This is public property.' I said, 'No it's not.'"
Statewide, the hunter is a species in decline. The number of deer hunting permits has decreased 13 percent since 1992, according to a 2001 S.C. Department of Natural Resources study, the latest numbers available.
Dove hunting, the second-most popular permit, has fallen 43 percent, and the dove harvest 40 percent, since 1990. Harvests for other animals have gone down, too, most dramatically for the black bear: 95 percent. Only turkey hunting permits are increasing.
"Times have changed," said Danny Stone, president of the Five Rivers Council, a hunting advocacy group in Georgetown. "It's a lot worse in Horry County, where you have so much development."
Between 1990 and 2000, Horry County's population increased by 36.5 percent, and the annual number of building permits issued for home construction doubled.
Government land-use maps indicate nearly two-thirds of Horry County is farmland or forest. About 50,000 acres are considered "vacant" land, though county projections show that number will be reduced to 5,000 acres in 2020. Still, only about a fifth of developable land has been used, according to the county's comprehensive plan.
Conservationists and hunters now find themselves championing the same cause: protection and conservation, according to conservationist Scott Yaich of Ducks Unlimited, a group that includes environmentalists and waterfowl hunters in its ranks.
"There's a lot of overlap," he said. "Our mission is habitat conservation, and we focus our activities on preserving wetlands and grasslands. But our activities certainly benefit hunters, and it's designed that way. Many of our members are sportsmen who want to conserve, and they do hunt. They're one and the same."
There are no numbers to prove it, but several local hunters say they think the number of Horry County hunters is holding steady, or even increasing, as hunters from outside the area move in.
That puts more pressure on shrinking wilderness. More and more, hunters have to pay private property owners for the right to hunt on their undeveloped land.
Or, they turn to public preserves that allow hunting.
Public dove hunting is allowed at the Schultz Tract near Stephens Crossroads, and dozens of hunters show up on weekends. Farther south, the 9,000-acre Lewis Ocean Bays Heritage Preserve has the state's largest concentration of black bears outside of the mountains.
As the march of development draws near, the preserve's habitat - and its animals - will be increasingly surrounded. Already, several housing developments lie adjacent to the preserve.
"[Development] happens gradually and incrementally, so you don't notice it so much," said Bob Perry of S.C. DNR. "But it's happening all around us, and it's something that hunters recognize."
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