Street Smarts for the Woods
For the beginner, hunting can be an overwhelming experience. Nevermind that one may not know much about firearms, understand the gear needed or how to use the right call. By removing all that you are left with a more fundamental set of skills which can be described by a solitary, single word: Woodsmanship. Nevermind the traditional sex roles that term might conjur up, Woodsmanship cares not about gender, race or wealth. Woodsmanship is being able to decipher what feels like sensory overload to the novice. The sounds, tracks, expansive terrain, shifting weather and seasonal changes in your quarry. Woodsmanship is knowing when to call and when to shut-up. Knowing when to move and when to set still. Knowing when to pass up on a bad shot and when to wait on a decent shot for a better one. It’s knowing how the land shapes the pattern of nature’s creatures, how the need for food, water and cover effects their habits and how their desire to breed can toss all of that out the window. Indeed, Woodsmanship is street smarts for the woods. So how do you get it?
While some of what is Woodsmanship can come natural, such as the ability to see the flick of a buck’s tail through dense, winter timber to the ability to navigate unfamiliar terrain without getting lost. However, much of Woodsmanship comes from a single source. Experience. Luckily for those of us young in our lifetime outdoors, experience doesn’t have to be the kind experienced first hand, it can be experiences others have accrued through the years. In fact, your first course – Woodsmanship 101 – should take advantage of as many outdoors veterans as you can. Working in your favor, many of the best outdoorsmen I know have a unique combination of arrogance and unselfishness that makes it easy to draw knowledge out of them. They can’t wait to tell you what they have learned while hunting and how good they are at doing it!
Your 200 level Woodsmanship course moves you to published works. Wikipedia, outdoors magazines, outdoors television shows and publications by outdoors organizations such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Ducks Unlimited (DU) and outdoor TV shows will be a good place to start and has the added benefits of serving you well when life keeps you indoors. My suggestion is to skip Barnes and Noble and head to your closest half-price book store where there will no doubt be a number of hunting books on the cheap. Better, in my opinion, are the regional online communities such as Iowa Sportsman. Not only do such communities have a lot of members with tons of experience, they can also lead to friendships with people willing to show a novice the ropes.
After that, your studies take you into woods where Mother Nature leads the class. Entering the woods shouldn’t make you feel you are encroaching so much as you joining your rightful place in nature. Woodsmanship is much to do with reestablishing your ties with nature that our society, full of distraction has tried hard to tear down. Once there Mother Nature will likely not lay quarry in your lap, rather, give you the chance to listen and watch your quarry allowing you to apply this knowledge on future hunts. In fact, Mother Nature will often give you as much advice on how to turkeys while you are on that deer hunt as she is about deer. Woodsmanship is being open to the experience, appreciating that killing is a small part of hunting, the blending in with nature to watch creatures do what they due is the truest reward of any hunt.
Finally, it’s important that if you learn nothing else from all this, that Woodsmanship isn’t so much an attainable goal, rather, a ladder that much be climbed one step at a time but that can, with the help of others, be scaled quicker. It’s a path that is best shared and when shared with a seasoned veteran of the wood, Woodsmanship is knowing they only do so with the implicit expectation that you will do the same for others.
NOTE: Many thanks to the Iowa Sportsman Community (formerly Iowa Outdoors). Their member continue to teach me about Woodsmanship and the true meaning of happiness.