I spent this past weekend giving one presentation after another at the Mother Earth News Fair in Seven Springs, PA. Around 15,000 people attended the fair and my publisher kept me very busy speaking and performing venison butchering demonstrations. My first book, 'The Beginners Guide to Hunting Deer for Food,' sold out completely (don't worry, its still available on line).We had a great mixture of aspiring and experienced hunters. My favorite part of the event was hearing from attendees afterward who told me how the approach to hunting deer that I teach would completely change the way that they learned to hunt.
The methods that I teach in my classes and in my book can be boiled down to a very few concepts that open up deer hunting to people who are otherwise unable to start hunting.
1. Learn to quarter and butcher your own deer in the field. Above all else, do this. New hunters don't usually own a pickup truck and don't have a way to transport a whole, gutted deer to a game processor. Instead of dropping ten grand on a pickup truck you can spend $35 on a medium-sized cooler with wheels. Quarter the deer in the field, put the meat in the cooler, put the cooler in your car.
Knowing how to do this also opens up a lot of public land that you wouldn't otherwise hunt. Most hunters don't go more than a mile from where they parked the truck because they know that they will have to drag the deer out later. If you learn how to disassemble the deer right where it died then you can go miles farther out with the much easier task of carrying 40 pounds of compact meat in a pack or cooler rather than 100 pounds of dead deer. This method is taught in the book.
2. Hunt from the ground, assuming that there is no local law requiring you to use tree stands. Tree stands cost a lot of money. You can easily drop $150 for an mid-priced stand, $100 for a ladder to get up to it, $100 for a safety harness and another $50 for a good rope. There you are $400 into it for the ability to hunt from one single spot. What happens if that spot isn't working out and you want to move to another area that day? Moving a tree stand and ladder is sort of a big production so you've got to drop another $250 for another stand and ladder for each additional spot.
That gets pretty expensive pretty fast. Tree stands work and they can be a good idea. But the sheer cost is prohibitively expensive to most aspiring new hunters. Especially given that new hunters are still figuring out where the deer are and will need to try new spots more often than experienced hunters.
Also note that falling out of tree stands accounts for a majority of deer hunting accidents and fatalities.
I'm not opposed to the use of tree stands. Go ahead and use them. But I think that they are better tools for experienced hunters or perhaps for new hunters who have an experienced hunter to show them exactly where to hang it. Learn how to hunt from the ground first and then move up to the trees later.
3. Study the animal, not the catalogs. There is an astounding array of hunting tools and accessories for sale. Most of them really work but few are really necessary to the new hunter just looking to put meat on the table. In sporting goods stores and in some hunting magazines it is too easy to become enamored of pieces of equipment that all seem ready to solve your problems.
You cannot hunt deer with your wallet. You hunt deer with your brain and a weapon. The only tools that you really need are a weapon and a knife. A thorough understanding of what motivates and influences deer throughout the year is the most essential thing to prepare you for the hunt. Understand the natural history and the anatomy and the landscape and then you will be able to predict where deer are likely to be. This, to me, is the essence of hunting deer.
These concepts are the underpinnings of my book and of the approach that I believe is needed to recruit new adult hunters. Telling someone that they need to drop thousands of dollars on equipment in order to hunt is totally counterproductive. People who have been hunting for their whole lives are often willing to make those big purchases but we cannot expect aspiring hunters to spend that kind of money on something they still don't know whether they will enjoy.
$350 for a rifle and scope. $30 for a knife. $17 or less for the book. That is all that you absolutely need to spend money on in order to successfully hunt deer for the rest of your life.
[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. All rights reserved.]
0 comments:
Post a Comment