Why Would You Take a Child Hunting?

It’s not for all kids, but for some, hunting is a great way to connect with nature and parents.

Ian is ready for this fall's hunting season.

Why on earth would you do it, a few folks have asked me.

“Why on earth would you let a child carry a loaded firearm? Why would you encourage a child to shoot and kill wildlife? Why would you take a child hunting?”

There are so many ways to answer that I hardly know where to start. The answer is both complex and simple.

First, a little setting: here in rural southwestern New Hampshire, we live in an ideal place to hunt. There’s plenty of forest, great habitat for white-tailed deer, wild turkey and other game, not to mention the warblers, thrushes and other species that thrive here.

A fair amount of these lands are open and available to hunting. And many of those lands, by the way, are protected by organizations and landowners through ownership or conservation easement. Hunters, hikers and nature-lovers of all sorts enjoy the benefits of this foresight.
 

Second: Unlike most people who learn hunting from their fathers, I did not. My father’s father, Ralph, was an avid hunter. You can see his pride of hunting in the weathered old photos and antlers on the walls of our camp in Maine. My dad hunted a little in his youth, but pretty much gave it up when I came of age. I took up hunting as an adult, mentored by a friend.

And while Son Number One has little interest in hunting, he’s a lover of the outdoors and a conservationist at heart, now studying forestry in college. Son Number Two, now 14, is also a lover of the outdoors and a conservationist. That’s Ian, who was a toddler when he started begging to join me hunting. 

Ian would carry a pop gun on those early “expeditions.” In later years, I’d let him carry an old .22 rifle with the action missing and we’d go out for an hour or two. For me, it was not really hunting; just fun time with the kid. For him, it was an all-out adventure, filled with the awesome, wondrous responsibility of listening, learning and safety. And always, the exciting possibility of a deer.

Youth Season for Deer

For the past two years, Ian and I have participated in New Hampshire’s youth deer hunt. It’s a specially designated weekend when a youth age 15 and under can hunt with a licensed adult. 

During the youth hunt, Ian is the one carrying the real, loaded gun. And I’m watching him carefully, making sure the muzzle is pointed in a safe direction and that he’s following all the other commandments of safe firearms handling. And like some of his youth-hunt peers, Ian has already taken and aced the N.H. Fish and Game hunter education class.  

The night before is a time of preparations. Ian lays out all the items he needs before meticulously packing his camo pack. The little survivalist packs knives, a poncho, rope, compass, gloves, extra socks, granola bars and who knows what else. He has anything needed to survive and thrive in the woods. He reads up on hunting, sets out his clothes and double-checks his alarm. This kid can’t wait.

We Hunt Because We’re Human

In today’s world, we don’t need to hunt to survive. As comfortable First World folks, we can get all the food we need at the supermarket or the farm, whether we’re vegans or omnivores. But we don’t need to do things because they’re easy or convenient. Sometimes we do things for the challenge.

We hunt because we’re human. It’s the ancient urge to gather, whether it’s nuts and berries or game. It’s an ancient urge to survive, to sustain. To learn from the world and to teach what we learn. These are impulses that arise from millions of years of human evolution. 

And as our garden veggies are delicious, so too is venison. It’s all natural, organic, free-ranging, sustainable and local. As hunters, we see how deer get by. And though we’re not guaranteed a deer, we may see how another deer gives its life and how it becomes our food. 

Getting Outside and Learning Respect

Whether a young hunter considers all these weighty matters about hunting and age-old instincts, I can’t say. I suspect a young hunter processes much of the hunt in many different and complex ways.

But I do know that kids spend too much time indoors, sitting in front of screens. Encouraging children to play and explore the outdoors is even a challenge for this parent, as it is for millions of other parents.

As for the guns, I’m not the first to admit there are too many guns (especially handguns), and American culture is way too violent. And I’m among many who’ll suggest that hunting instills in children a respect for firearms, an understanding of wildlife and a keener awareness that life and death are intertwined in many ways. Folks who grow up with farm animals know what I’m saying.

That’s not to say that hunting is all about shooting and death. Far from it. I hunted for years without shooting anything!

Preserving Our Environment and Traditions

But hunting is also about patience. It’s about reading details in the woods, like tracks, buck rubs and scrapes. It’s about stepping quietly on crunchy leaves. It’s about watching the clouds and hearing the wind and tolerating the cold rain and snow. It’s about planning and anticipation. It’s about the warm tea from a Thermos on a cold day. It’s about sitting quietly with your kin, no words exchanged, just a nod now and then and an understanding. It’s about returning to a warm home, scented with fresh-baked cookies. It’s about stories – many great stories – that we’ll share for decades.

Ian and I already have many hunting stories, from the three black bears that walked by us last year, to this year’s tree stand adventures. We look forward to many more.

But when it comes to hunting with a child, don’t just take my word for it. Here’s what Ian says about it:

“From hunting I have learned about respecting and preserving our environment and our traditions, so future generations will still be able to enjoy what we do today. I have learned about the animals themselves too, and the more you know about our nature the more you want to preserve it. Hunter education has taught me about ethics and the proper safe ways to hunt and overall has made me a better naturalist, hunter and individual.”

Well said, Ian.

Now, gather up your stuff. Let’s go hunting!

Eric Aldrich writes from his home in Hancock.

100 Years Since the Last Passenger Pigeon

The pigeon’s extinction is a reminder for us to pay attention.

 

A passenger pigeon taken in 1893 in Westfield,
Massachusetts, mounted and on display at the
N.H. Fish and Game Department in Concord.

Imagine for a minute a bird that flies in flocks so enormous that they blot out the sun, taking hours to pass and in such intensity of sound that you’d swear a freight train was passing near. 

Imagining is the now only way you can experience the passenger pigeon. It has been extinct for 100 years. Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, died September 1, 1914, in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo.

It was a beautiful and strong bird. In his book “A FeatheredRiver across the Sky,” author Joel Greenberg says the passenger pigeon “looked like a mourning dove on steroids.” Its muscular body carried its 10 to 12 ounces along migrations across eastern North America, from the Gulf of Mexico in Texas to the Canadian Maritimes and west to Alberta.

Males were slate-blue and gray, with a breast of iridescent copper and purple. Females were a bit drabber, but delicately brilliant. Individually and collectively, in their enormous flocks, they were a remarkable sight, flying low like a tight school of fish, splitting off and re-forming in great undulating clouds.

While some birds would defy the crowd and fly in solo pairs, they would be seen twice a year as they moved over the lands, including here in New Hampshire. 

Loading Trees by the Thousands

They loaded individual trees by the thousands, to the point where branches would sag heavy with their weight and break. They would arrive in densities so thick that birds were atop birds.

In “A Feathered River,” Greenberg describes John Josselyn’s travels through New England in the 1600s, encountering a single beech tree in New Hampshire that supported 500 nests.

As easy prey, passenger pigeons were a staple in the diet of native peoples thousands of years ago. Northern goshawks, Cooper’s hawks and peregrine falcons likely thrived on them, too.

And from nearly the start of their arrival to North America, Europeans killed them, sometimes for sport, sometimes for market, sometimes for hungry mouths and sometimes for no good reason at all. In New Hampshire, large flocks of passenger pigeons were said to have helped stave off starvation in 1781 when crops failed.

Greenberg sites accounts of children grabbing pigeons by the feet and providing parents with meals. They were taken by rifle, shotgun, hand nets, nets strung between trees and all sorts of clever means. As rails were laid and city markets developed, pigeoners – as they were called – devised ever more improvised ways to kill, prepare, store and sell passenger pigeons for the plate.

Shooting ‘Til the End

Some pigeoners set up long poles at an angle, points protruding above the treetops, where pigeons would alight by the score. One well-aimed shotgun blast would take dozens of birds at a time. Some trained live pigeons to set atop a stool hoisted by a pole to attract hordes of wild pigeons, hence the name stool pigeon.

They were shot as sport in competition, in pigeon shoots. And when passenger pigeons were gone, clay pigeons took their place.

For three centuries, people killed pigeons throughout North America. And when their numbers declined in the 1870s, some remaining passenger pigeons amassed in great numbers. In April 1871, pigeons began nesting in central Wisconsin, ultimately gathering in an area 850 square miles, the largest recorded pigeon nesting site ever. There, they were slaughtered by the millions.

Of course, habitat loss played a role in their demise. Some speculate disease may have hastened it. But few biologists dispute what brought an end to the passenger pigeon.

“Europeans began the killing on or about July 12, 1605, and their successors, the residents of Canada and the United States, did not stop until there were literally no more birds left,” writes Greenberg. “When that happened, they shot mourning doves in the belief they were passenger pigeons. Virtually every time Homo sapiens crossed paths with the pigeons, pigeons died.”

A New Generation of Hope

The last one to be killed in New Hampshire was either a bird in Acworth in 1881 (mounted and on display at the town library), or one shot by W.W. Flint in 1885 in Concord.

By the turn of the century, the last wild passenger pigeons were gone. Only a handful of captive pigeons remained in private collections or zoos. And by September 1, 1914, the aging Martha gave up at the Cincinnati Zoo. The end of a species. Every last one. Gone.

The passenger pigeon’s demise came at a time when mankind’s extreme mistreatment of nature was also inspiring a new generation of hope. Forests in New Hampshire and beyond were being cut to the bone, filling the air with wildfire smoke and clogging Manchester’s mills with silt from the eroding White Mountains. The Weeks Act of 1911 helped protect the White Mountains and other forests.

Theodore Roosevelt and scores of other conservationists inspired new laws to limit market hunting and build what’s now known as the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Outlaw market hunting; regulate hunters; put taxes on hunting equipment toward science and management; allow states to manage game. It’s not perfect, but it’s still pretty good.

Federal laws were passed and treaties signed to outlaw hunting of birds and other migratory species and allow for their recovery. We’ve seen many species recover, including iconic animals like bison and bald eagles.

Is There Hope?

But 100 years since the passenger pigeon’s demise, the cloud of extinction hovers. And it might be a growing cloud.

Even common species can become rare. In New Hampshire and throughout the Northeast, native bats have been ravaged by disease that biologists are scrambling to understand. One biologist told me that the loss of bats is akin to losing, say, all of our frog species.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, 30 percent of amphibians are at risk of extinction; 21 percent of mammals, reptiles and fish; and 12 percent of birds. The culprits are many and complex: loss of habitat, pollution, illegal hunting or take and the introduction of non-native species.

And the biggie: Climate change. It may threaten a lot more than polar bears. The rapidly shifting climate could bring extinctions from pole to pole and the many places in between, especially the tropics, the breadbaskets of biological diversity. In the oceans, in the forests, rivers and skies, some species are hanging on by a thread. Small shifts in the world’s temperatures, in the ocean’s chemical composition and in sea levels could spell the end for some species.

Is there hope? There has to be.

If nothing else, the loss of the passenger pigeon reminds us that we need to pay attention. Take care of what we have. Now. Before it’s too late.

A Comeback of Too Much Success?

The elusive buck.

Despite our tangled relationship with the species, let’s be thankful for the amazing white-tailed deer.

After years of enjoyable effort every fall, I got a deer a few weeks ago.

This late-comer to hunting squeezed the trigger on my fussy old muzzleloader and brought down a healthy young buck at 50-plus yards.

I took a moment to pay respects and admire this beautiful animal. Its thick gray-brown coat. Its big, brown and now lifeless eyes. And I felt sad, excited and thankful all at once, feelings that quickly vanished as I moved to the tasks of gutting and hauling the deer out of the woods in the waning daylight.

But while I focused on the tasks at hand, my thoughts also darted to the complexities of the species I was dragging: Odocoileus virginianus, possibly the most widely distributed big-game animal in North America.

It has fed generations of North American hunters, from paleo-Indians 10,000 years ago to my grandfather and father, to my own family. We owe it to the deer and to ourselves to step back once in a while and appreciate our tangled relationship with this beautiful and much-hated, much-admired creature.

“Deerly” Held Beliefs

Everyone has an opinion about white-tailed deer, and for some folks, those thoughts are strong. Please forgive the brash generalizations, but a few perspectives go something like this:

The deer-hunter: New Hampshire could use a few more deer, especially big bucks.

The anti-hunter: Let deer be deer. Don’t hunt them.

The tree-grower: There are so many deer, it’s hard, if not impossible, to regenerate the forest.

The deer managers: The N.H. Fish and Game Department tries to strike a balance in managing deer numbers for an array of interest, including: allowing hunting for recreation; growing timber; avoiding deer-vehicle collisions, among others.

Of course, the many shades of gray among the above aren’t the loudest voices.

The Last Deer in Town

It’s a challenge to hunt deer in New Hampshire. Just ask hunters. The statewide success rate is 10.8 percent. So, for every 10 hunters who try to bag a deer every year, roughly one succeeds.

Comparing success rates state-by-state is problematic. But if you look at another metric, New Hampshire is at the low end of 1.43 deer killed per square mile, while Maryland and Delaware are at 10.3 and 10.1, respectively. But there’s a lot to unpack in those stats.

If it’s challenging to get a deer in New Hampshire today, it was a lot harder in the 1800s and early 1900s, when whitetails were virtually wiped out from generations of unregulated harvest and market hunting.

When William W. Hayward published the History of Hancock in 1889, he wrote that, “The last (deer) shot in town was killed by Isaac Fitch in 1818, near Antrim line.”

North American Model

Gradually, and more so since the 1940s, deer recovered, thanks to the resilience of New England’s forests and significantly improved management. Deer, black bear, wild turkey, moose, several waterfowl species and others have recovered in part from acts of congress and the vision of what would become known as the North American model of wildlife conservation. Among its tenets is that wildlife is a public resource – not a private commodity to be bought and sold – and that it must be managed by science.

Funded by hunters’ license fees and a federal excise tax on hunting firearms and ammo, hunters were and remain the key to this model. Based on the emerging science of wildlife management, agencies like N.H. Fish and Game eliminated market hunting and established seasons, bag limits and hunter education.

Now there are 44,000 resident hunters in New Hampshire – mostly deer-hunters – and another 14,000 non-residents who hunt here. And their activity pumps $60.5 million into New Hampshire’s economy every year.

The model has worked pretty well for years. But it’s not perfect.

Magnificent Mammals or “Mountain Maggots”

For one thing, the numbers of hunters is on the decline. So that restricts the ability to fund management of deer and other wildlife.

Second, the recovery of white-tailed deer has been way too successful in many parts of the country, where deer ruin crops and shrubbery, devastate forests and native vegetation, pose hazards on the roads, and help the spread of Lyme disease.

In his book Nature Wars, author Jim Sterba notes the deer’s sliding reputation. “When they were scarce, whitetails were seen almost universally as elegant creatures, a thrill to watch leaping a fence, tail high. As their numbers grew, perceptions changed. They became nuisances, even menaces. Some people called them defoliation machines, long-legged rats, or, as some Pennsylvanians dubbed them, mountain maggots.”

The spread of suburbia and development across the Eastern seaboard has created the perfect environment for whitetails: edge galore. And along with suburbia and a declining connection with nature has come less understanding and tolerance of hunting. The result: more edge, more deer, fewer hunters, fewer hunting opportunities and more people complaining about more deer.

In states where deer have become so numerous, communities (or corporate properties) have had to hire sharpshooters to reduce deer numbers. And the cost can be upwards of $300 per deer, with the meat usually going to a local food pantry.

In such places, deer managers are increasingly talking about allowing limited, very controlled programs that would allow the sales of venison. Some models suggest having state-approved clubs be certified to remove deer in overpopulated sites and sell the meat to local farmers’ markets.

The notion of allowing even limited sales of venison remains controversial and would be less likely here in New Hampshire than in parts of Connecticut, New York or New Jersey where deer densities can approach 100 or more deer per square mile.

By comparison, New Hampshire’s deer densities are 5 to 15 per square mile.

Thankful for Deer

But when you set aside the numbers and debates about management and you talk to hunters, you have stories. You hear stories of challenging hunts, stories of passing the tradition and stories about amazing deer.

I’ve enjoyed many days hunting deer. I’ve seen gorgeous sunrises. I’ve watched does so close I could’ve poked them with my muzzleloader. With my son this year, I watched three black bears just a few steps away. I’ve learned many square miles of wonderful countryside right here in our backyard.

I’ve learned to appreciate how elegant, mysterious and perceptive deer can be.

And this year, I have a few more reasons to be thankful for the amazing white-tailed deer.

Eric Aldrich writes from his home in Hancock.