Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i Bowhunter

How To Stalk Silently Wild animals have incredible ears. They can hear a pin drop, and instantly recognize natural versus dangerous sounds. Quiet footwear is essential for sneaking up on game. Of course, you must pick your walking routes to avoid the worst of leaves, twigs, and pebbles. But well-chosen, soft-soled boots flex with underfoot debris and let you feel your way across the ground. Some archers remove their boots to stalk, but I’ve found this unnecessary when I wear the right footwear to begin with. If you cannot depress a boot sole at least1/8 inch with your thumb, it is too hard for quiet walking. Neoprene, chain-tread or air-bob pac soles, and gum rubber are all great. Hard rubber and Vibram are not. Clothing, the uppers on boots, and…

IT SEEMS THAT the Far Left will never go away. In fact, they are everywhere, from trying to stop bear hunting in New Jersey to the continual onslaught against trapping on federal lands. However, their latest and very effective strategy is the use of social media. Sometimes it’s biased reporting, but often it’s just flat out publishing false statements intended to sway public opinion. For example, the July 5, 2018, Daily Express had a story with the following headline: “Poachers EATEN by pride of lions after breaking into reserve to slaughter rhinos for horns.” The story goes on to describe how three rhino poachers broke into a South Africa reserve and got killed by lions. That story was true. The headline was accurate. Then the Newsner reran that story with…

In the gray dawn light, I could see the trails in front of my ladder stand were pocked with tracks in the two-day-old snow. Conditions seemed perfect. Clear, cold, and still. An hour passed with a scattering of does and fawns drifting into the thick cover of the bedding area. After another hour of stillness, movement to my left caught my attention. I strained with my binoculars, trying to see detail through the dense trees. My clumsy efforts revealed a moderately heavy buck with a few “extras” on each antler, adding to his character. Good buck, I thought. I love character on a buck, and this one was walking on the close trail. Eight yards…I got this, I thought, as I reached for my bow and got ready. I drew…

IT WAS FEBRUARY 1989. My wife, Thalia, and I had moved from Phoenix, Arizona, back to Kansas and were settled into new jobs and routines. We were happy to be home. Then, that summer we suffered separate accidents. Thalia broke her tibia in a company softball game, and a week later I shattered my left arm in a bike accident. Eventually we healed, but I live with some limitations. I’m limited in draw weight due to a damaged triceps muscle, and my draw length is now shorter due to minor loss of motion. The hardware remains in my arm, but I still enjoy my main pastime — bowhunting. There are a lot of archers out there who have limitations, mostly due to shoulder problems. The following words are intended to…

THERE ARE MANY fallacies in life, and certainly in archery as well. You know, things that archers perceive to be true based on industry hype and marketing claims. The worst of these misconceptions surround the compound bow and accessory market. It’s the same year in and year out: Buy this new bow, arrow, sight, or release, and you’ll maximize your results. Unfortunately, this simply is not always the case. Good gear is precious, and every archer must sift through the details to come up with the best of the best. But just because it’s newer, lighter, faster, smoother, etc. does not mean it’s somehow better, especially for a specific archer and his or her unique bowhunting needs. In this column, I’ve listed four common misunderstandings that often muddy the waters…

CONSERVATION THROUGH wildlife management has been the mantra for game departments across North America. For decades, hunters have been paying the lion’s share of both game and non-game species management thanks to an excise tax on firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment. But since hunter numbers are declining, what will the future hold? Not many hunters, biologists, or state/federal wildlife agency professionals would argue that we have failed miserably in telling our story to the general public of how hunters saved countless animals from extinction. Ironically, when hunters are given an opportunity to harvest game animals, their dollars are used to benefit all wildlife. This 1937 funding mechanism, called the North American Wildlife Conservation Model, is still the envy of the world. Last year, 3,715,524 bowhunters took over 1.23 million deer…

Never forget that good moose country is also good brown and grizzly bear country. My thoughts on bear protection may be a bit skewed. After all, I live in Alaska, bowhunt brown bears annually, go on many drop-camp hunts, and have had hundreds of bear interactions. These encounters have ranged from the normal split-second sighting of a brown bear as it explosively vacated the premises at the slightest sound or whiff of my human scent, to the extremely rare situation where I suddenly found myself in a true life-or-death scenario that necessitated my killing a 1,000-pound boar at five feet as it charged me from behind. With that said, I wish these big bruins no ill will. In fact, I still feel that big browns and grizzlies are one of…

JESSE LED THE WAY as we neared the bait we planned to hunt. I studied him as he slowly scanned the area. His suspicion was confirmed when he quickly signaled that there was a bear on the fresh bait! Evaluating the situation, he motioned us to move forward. I couldn’t believe it when the bear just kept chowing down food as cameraman Matt Young and I snuck toward Jesse. The bear simply didn’t care that we were there. As I stood less than 20 yards away, I waffled from calm to nervous as the bear seemingly looked right through us. Jesse motioned that the bear was a nice-sized boar, but it had been less than 24 hours since we arrived on the island. I came to full draw but knew…

Bowhunter Magazine has joined with Nelson Outfitters (Dave Nelson, 307/751-2262, nelsonoutfitters.com ) and a topnotch group of bowhunting equipment manufacturers to sponsor our 2019 Youth Hunter Essay Contest (see the list of sponsoring manufacturers below). This is our 23rd annual essay contest, and we hope youth participants will make it another great one! Last year’s Grand Prize Winner, Jacob VanRisseghem, and his adult sponsor, Nathan VanRisseghem, from Brainerd, Minnesota, spent three days chasing longbeards in Wyoming, and Jacob made a great shot on a beautiful turkey with his bow. Congratulations to young Jacob, as well as to the rest of last year’s prize winners, who we’re confident are putting their new gear courtesy of our generous friends in the archery industry to good use. If you are in the market…

FOOT HUNTING has always been my favorite. I grew up chasing blacktail deer in the rugged hills of Northern California, where taking any kind of stand would have been a joke. Animals were too scarce and wandered too randomly to make ambushing them an option. So, I started honing my bowhunting skills at an early age with boots on the ground. Stand-hunting can certainly be lethal on a few of our continent’s 29 species of big game. I have shot more than a dozen pronghorns from pit blinds beside water, many whitetail deer from treestands and ground blinds, and more than one elk near seeps or springs. But given a choice, I prefer stalking or still-hunting. Hunting on foot can be deadly on a wide variety of animals in a…

IF YOU HAVE READ some of my columns over the years, you may have caught the fact that I’ve had a few issues with my shoulders. I have been shooting a bow for about 40 years, and sometimes I can feel it. A few horse spills and pulled muscles hasn’t helped matters. I also never took the break from shooting my bow, or throwing and stacking haybales, that was suggested by a specialist for a quicker recovery. His actual comment was to give it a rest so I could heal, but I just never found time to do that. Too many things I wanted to do, or needed to do, and they all required my shoulders doing stuff. I started experimenting with lighter draw weight longbows and recurves. The longbow…

WITH THE ADVENT of trail cameras, deer scouting has changed for many of us. Today, it’s far more common and easier to hang some cameras in the summer, and then check them before the season opens up. It’s undeniable that cameras should play a role in our efforts to gure out deer moveme t, but usi g t em as a sole means of scouting is selling the process short. This is especially true if you aren’t the titleholder to a good chunk of deer ground that you can control. If you spend your fall on public dirt, or hunt permission-based land that other hunters are on as well, you should consider scouting now. In fact, even those of us lucky enough to have exclusive ground would benefit from spending…

I used a 60-pound Hoyt Carbon RX-1 bow equipped with a QAD rest, Axcel sight, and TightSpot quiver on my most recent successful moose hunt. Indeed, your everyday whitetail bow will work well on big bulls, with a couple of tweaks that is. First, consider opting for a multi-pin sight. Although I love my single-pin mover sight and have had good success with it bowhunting deer from blinds and treestands, the simple fact is that a bull moose coming to a call seldom stands still long enough to allow an archer to range him and adjust the setting on a moveable-pin sight. Stuff happens fast when bowhunting moose, so a sturdy three, five, or even seven-pin sight is often a better choice. I use a seven-pin sight so that I…

As my boot slid awkwardly off the slimy spruce root and wedged between another moss-covered log in the avalanche chute I began to fall sideways, anticipating the discomfort of another wrenched knee, twisted ankle, or worse. Fortunately, I drove one of my trekking poles deep enough into the ground to prevent a tumble and a painful outcome, but it would likely only be a matter of time before the incident repeated itself with a less favorable result. Such are the travails of bowhunting mountain goats in the rugged backcountry of British Columbia, where it is not a question of if your body will take a beating, but how debilitating the inevitable abuse will be. Everything associated with hunting goats is extreme — the habitat, the weather, the physical demands,…

AFRICA • Zambeze Delta Safaris African game www.zambezedeltasafaris.com ALABAMA • Great Southern Outdoors Whitetails, Hogs www.greatsouthernoutdoors.com ALASKA • Jim River Guide Service Brown Bear, Moose, Bison www.guidedalaskahunting.com ALBERTA • Silver Fox Outfitters Whitetails, Moose www.silverfoxoutfitters.com COLORADO • Hubbard Creek Outfitters Elk, Mule Deer, Bear www.hubbardcreek.com • G R Bar Ranch Elk www.grbarranch.com/hunting FLORIDA • Ross Hammock Ranch Native and Exotic www.floridabowhunting.com ILLINOIS • Harpole’s Heartland Lodge Whitetails www.HeartlandLodge.com KENTUCKY • Whitetails of Western KY Outfitters Whitetails www.whitetailsofwesternkyoutfitters.com • Brute Buck Outfitters Whitetails www.kywhitetailhunts.com MISSOURI • North East Missouri Hunting Company Whitetails, Turkey www.nemohuntingcompany.com MONTANA • J&J Guide Service Elk, Whitetails, Mule Deer, Antelope, Merriam’s Turkey www.jjguide.com…