Hunters as endangered species? A bid to rebuild ranks.

Besides their youth-marketing initiatives, the firearms industry and hunting organizations are also assisting many recruitment efforts run by state wildlife agencies worried by declining revenue from hunting license sales.

"It has been a red flag," says Michael Ellis, spokesman for Indiana's Division of Fish and Wildlife. "Youth hunting has been declining, and if they don't hunt, neither will their sons and daughters."

Although cooperation between state wildlife agencies and pro-hunting groups has long been the rule, growing urgency over declining numbers of hunters is fueling closer alliances and more intense efforts to protect a $20 billion industry, observers say.

"We're seeing a lot of things that indicate to us an erosion of the public interest," says Heidi Prescott, a spokeswoman for the Humane Society of the United States in Washington. "It's an increased effort, like a final gasp of desperation."

Public agencies should serve a wider constituency, including far more wildlife watchers, some 66 million participants who spent $38 billion in 2001, and quit catering to the hunting industry, antihunting advocates say.

"What we find so objectionable is that these public-service agencies are involving themselves in recruiting hunters and now, in some cases, have even made it part of their strategic plans," says Ms. Prescott.

Industry and state officials, however, are unapologetic.

"We have an interest in building commerce for the future for our members," says Steve Wagner, a spokesman for the NSSF, based in Newtown, Conn. "As commerce and participation builds, so do the ties to conservation funding."

Indiana's Fish and Wildlife Division, for instance, received an $18,110 grant from the NSSF to create and promote an "annual small-game hunting day." Those funds paid for billboards and posters. Indiana officials say there was no undue influence involved.

"The efforts done with those dollars are for nothing other than to promote hunting and shooting - there's no advertising or manufacturer involvement," says Kyle Hupfer, a hunter himself and director of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, which oversees the division.

The state's youth hunt, in which kids accompanied by adults were permitted to shoot a "bag limit" of five squirrels and 15 mourning doves in a day, is the first step with programs like next year's youth deer hunt.

Animal preservation groups say more than 100 million animals are needlessly killed for sport annually nationwide. But agencies and hunting groups say that hunting license sales fund vital efforts to maintain habitat programs, including those that aided the resurgence of the bald eagle and wild turkey.

Indeed, state efforts to recruit new hunters has less to do with managing surging wildlife populations, such as deer, though it is a factor, and much more to do with maintaining budgets, state officials say.

"We need the revenue from hunting licenses to ensure that our conservation efforts succeed," says Susan Langlois, administrator of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife's Hunter Education Program. "A lot of people try to be supportive," she adds. "But hunters are truly the ones that support us in trying to manage for biodiversity."

The situation is especially dire in Massachusetts. Hunting-license purchases have dropped by more than half over two decades. So the state is now recruiting young hunters and, with a $19,000 NSSF grant, officials hope to double their youth hunting programs this fall. In Alabama, some $26,000 in NSSF funding saved the state's "youth dove hunts," threatened by state budget cuts.

"If we're not growing we're losing ground," Gary Moody, chief of wildlife at Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, wrote in a statement citing the NSSF program as a boon. "Our job is to improve and strengthen hunter numbers."

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