GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — It was the second day of the hunt last year when Tyler Seacrest, then 16, took his first deer.

Tyler, thin and reedy, with a science-lover’s precision of speech, grew up an avid backyard archer, he said. But before that day his targets had only been targets. The arrow, shot from inside a camouflage blind at about 25 yards, severed the doe’s spinal artery just behind the shoulder blade, and she bled out quickly.

“A clean kill,” he recalled last week, sitting by the fire pit on a crisp fall night at a youth group meeting on the grounds of Redlands Community Church, where his father is the pastor.

Will Tyler hunt again this year?

He paused. The fire crackled and hissed.

“I’m kind of busy right now,” he said. Life as a senior in high school, not to mention Calculus II and a college course in computer animation, has his attention.

For defenders and supporters of hunting — as cultural tradition, as intellectual honesty in putting meat on the table, as financial sustenance for wildlife agencies that depend on license revenues — Tyler’s distracted, less-than-passionate enthusiasm for hunting is the demographic reality.

Reasons for disinterest

Whether it is about killing or simply about being out in the woods, in the cold and wet of fall dragging a big animal over steep terrain, hunting is just not cool to many young people. Fewer hunting licenses were sold in Colorado in 2008 than in any other year since 1979, according to the most recent figures from the State Division of Wildlife.

“The average age continues to creep up,” said Jim Bulger, the hunter outreach coordinator at the Colorado Division of Wildlife. So the department has deployed “mentors” to work with budding hunters (one was in the blind that day last year, along with Tyler’s father, Jeff, also a bow-hunter). The department’s website also offers extensive advice about easing into the world of big game: Elk Hunting University.

“To come to Colorado and kill an elk is the final exam,” Bulger said.

Tyler — who said that about half the meat his family eats is wild, some of it provided by his father — said the killing itself did not trouble him.

“Killing these animals keeps the population strong,” he said.

Seacrest, the pastor, said he even incorporated hunting metaphors into spiritual teaching. A good Christian life, he said, is about aiming true.

“The word ‘sin’ literally means ‘missing the mark,’” he said.

Tyler, for his part, is still drawn to the prospect of geese or duck hunting. The idea of coordinating flight path, trajectory and muzzle velocity intrigues him — as a math problem, he said.