Days leading up to the much-anticipated Aug. 1 opening of the Illinois squirrel season often get dampened by depressing numbers depicting declines in participation and harvest.
So let’s start with this: Hunters harvested 265,000 squirrels during 2022-23, the most recent season documented by the Illinois Natural History Survey. If those numbers brighten your outlook, maybe skip the next lines, because a decade prior – during the 2012-23 season – the harvest was 475,000.
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