Stories of youth hunt successes
“I didn’t hear a single rifle shot from the cabin or while hunting Saturday morning,” my good friend and retired Col. Matt Mattner told me. “And of course with the wind on Sunday you wouldn’t hear anything anyway, but I hoped at least a couple kids would have had some shooting at deer at least.”
He was talking about the statewide annual youth deer hunt held last weekend. The hunt allows young hunters up to 15 years old to hunt deer with a firearm for two days each year in early October. With the mentored hunt program rules the young hunter does not need to have passed a Hunters Ed class. This provides a lot of flexibility for getting kids out into the woods.
A proposal to expand the youth deer hunt to a week-long hunt got voted down at the statewide annual spring hearing last spring. I think hunters expressed multiple reasons why they voted not to extend the hunt beyond two days. It basically came down to hunters with kids in the youth hunt age range like the hunt and wanted to extend it, hunters that don’t have kids that youth hunt don’t. Valid points both pro and con exist on both sides. Non-hunting outdoor enthusiasts don’t support a longer youth hunt either.
Several pics from friends that took their youth hunters out started showing up on social media and by texts in late afternoon Saturday. I’m sure you saw many of the same pics and more. I didn’t hear a lot of shooting on Saturday, not a single shot. Yet clearly quite a few young hunters shot their first deer, several their first buck. I didn’t see any pics of someone shooting a great big old heavy racked buck, but I’m betting someplace in the state a young hunter at least took a crack at one.
In our area the rifle creates an advantage for the youth hunt. Hunting the edge of a field extends the effective range over a bow and makes more deer harvestable. But in the woods, in the area that Matt and I hunted Monday morning, the rifle only provided advantages if the hunter found it easier to aim. Enough leaves remained on the trees that a clear shot didn’t exist beyond 30 yards, in many places less. Archery equipment shoots that distance fairly easily.
One friend’s daughter enjoyed success Saturday morning by bagging her first deer, a fork horned buck. His son bagged a little six point buck that evening. Big smiles on those pictures and sweet dreams Saturday night.
Another friend’s son doubled up on antlerless deer. They couldn’t hunt until Saturday evening and planned to hunt big woods for big bucks. When the forecast for Sunday changed to include winds gusting up to 35 mph in that area, they decided to hunt farmland stands Saturday evening and hunt what they saw. Just a few examples of young hunters I know enjoying success. Standing in line in a store, a lady told me about the wonderful weekend that her and husband enjoyed with their son and two oldest grandchildren because of the youth hunt. “They came home to hunt and my husband took out the oldest, who’s 14, and my son took out our granddaughter, who’s 12, and they both got their deer 10 minutes apart in different fields on our farm,” she said. “She even got a buck for her first deer.” I figure stories like that fall in the “pro” category for the youth hunt. I’m betting if I wasn’t wearing a blaze orange shirt for a grouse hunt, the cashier wouldn’t have asked if I was deer hunting. And if her grandchildren hadn’t hunted deer on their farm that weekend, she wouldn’t have interjected into the conversation and told me that story. That’s one of the things I like about the youth hunt, it brings people together.
We like seeing pics of kids with a deer they just harvested. We like the smiles, we like the idea of venison in the freezer, we like offering congratulations, and we like hearing the stories. The youth hunt creates a focused time each year with bunch of all of that happening on a weekend. It’s a pick me up for rural communities and our rural way of living.
Congratulations to all the successful youth hunters. And good luck to those still hunting, but please remember, Safe Hunting is No Accident!
THROUGH A
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CHUCK K OLAR LOCAL OUTDOORSMAN
