Most of the time I feel like a shooter on a guided hunt, he finds the game. Now I'm beginning to feel that way about my deer hunting. I sit in a stand overlooking a bean field, I know where the deer come out and it's just a matter of taking my time and making a good shot.
In the bad ole" days I hunted endless hard wood forests with few deer in Southern Mo. No snow just crunchy leaves to walk on no deer trails you could follow and sign was sparce. No one ever heard of a tree stand and 4 wheeler"s hadn't been invented yet.Nor did we have a plethera of guns and equiptment like today. It was you,a rifle,knife and thousands of unbroken acres of hardwood forest.Just seeing a deer was a major accomplishment ! I learned to hunt,taught by an old timer under those conditions. But, now I find I've lost those skills he taught me. I've become more of a shooter than a hunter although I still hunt sign,pattern bucks and try to calculate the right place at the right time. The deer are so thick in North Mo. you can sit in your truck and kill one.(I'm handicapped so I have a special permit to do that if necessary) It just isn't the same as the old way and it's beginning to bother me. Maybe my deer hunting days are winding down, age has a way of changing things.
So have we become deer shooters or hunters ?

I think it depends. For example, the area where I hunt elk has large very wide open meadows, or "parks" as we call them. After the opening gunfire, they like to head out into those parks and hang out in the middle and won't budge. "COOL!" you say, but take this into account. The meadow/park where I hunt is about two miles wide and over six miles long, and about as flat as a pancake. Damn little cover. I had a cow tag and the herd was out in the park. it took me maybe a bit over an hour to reach the last bit of cover when the elk started to move a bit. I sure wished I had a bull tag as the biggest bull in that herd had to be 400 plus. As it was about a mile and a half drag back to my truck, The ground may be flat but there are lots of large rocks hidden in that tall grass that can tear out the bottom of my Toyota 4x4.
So, here I am behind this very small bush with no way to get closer. Should I shoot or not? My laser rangefinder says 530 yards. My rifle, a Winchester M70 .300 Win. Mag. pushing a 200 gr. Speer Hot-core at 2950 FPS with a very stiff load of WMR powder. From the sit, I can consistantly knock down four out of five ram silhouettes at 500 meters with that rifle and load. It's early morning and there is absolutely no wind. Shoot or don't shoot? Am I hunting or just shooting? Our big game seasons here in Arizona usually run four days with a couple of exceptions and elk seasons are not one of them. Elk tags are hard to draw. It could be five years or more before I draw another one. I took the shot. The bullet hit about six inches behind the shoulder and just at the right place to break the spine. bang/flop.
Looking back, that happened four years ago and I have not drawn another elk tag since.
I certainly understand about getting older. I'm 68 years old right now, and I don't figure I have too many hunting seasons left.
So the question arises. Am I hunting or just shooting? Frankly, I've always been a meat hunter when it comes down to the nitty gritty of it. I've hunted the jungle like rain forest of Northwestern California, the fairly open desert of Northern Nevada and a few other places with varying conditions as well. Like you, getting older has affected how I hunt and what I use. With one bad knee right now and the other one getting ready to go, I'm eligible for a CHAMP permit. All I need to do is ask my doctor for the permission slip and the state will give me one. Then I can hunt and shoot from my truck legally. Don't think I'll ask for one of those yet. Guess I'm still a hunter after all.
Paul B.

I like to feel like i"m "hunting", even though sometimes i"ll spot a deer feeding at 100 yards or less and get an easy shot off before it sees or smells me.
Sometimes i"ll get an exciting stalk where i have to close the distance or aproach from another angle to get out of the wind, and this gives a bigger sense of achievement if successful. Both are perfectly legitimate, as if you"re hunting a wild animal there are no guarantees of what the animal will do.
I don"t feel "cheated" if a good antlered deer presents a real easy shot after i slept in, turned up late, made lots of noise, and the deer still walks out in front of me 10 minutes into the hunt! If i have to work for it, i do appreciate it more, but sitting up somewhere and waiting for a deer to come out at a distance is just as much hunting as crawling through the brush.
It"s only a problem if you"re not enjoying it!
good shooting

Hardluck, You haven't lost those skills you simply haven't had to practice them for a while. The way that you learned to hunt is the way I was taught as well. First for me in our Adirondaks and later in our Catskill mountains, lots of land back then. Now, it becomes a matter of style, and somewhat of choice as to how we hunt. I would rather drive deer than be a sitter, yet know that generally the sitters get more shooting. I get more pleasure in the hunt though. It is a matter of active versus passive, to chase rather than to ambush. Both are quite legitimate methods, so that old expression of "suit yourself" would surely seem to apply. Enjoy all time spent afield, it's the best we have on this earth.

Good hunting

I am retired and live on a farm, with a tremendous deer population that eat my soybeans like they are candy. It is not uncommon for me to get 20-25 doe tags each year due to crop damage. As a young man I hunted with a recurve bow. During the beginning of my "working" years, I used a rifle to deer hunt, but it just got so easy - Buy an accurate 270 win, Find a good stand location over one of my fields, Wait for the deer I have seen come into the fields a hundred times previously, shoot said deer, go home. TOO EASY! About 16 years ago I got back in to traditional archery. The thrill of the hunt returned immediately. I still use a rifle for a few does each year, but the majority of my hunts, for deer, elk, rabbits, etc. is with either a recurve or longbow with homemade wood arrows. Nothing quite like traditional bow-hunting IMO.

When I go to a range and shoot targets I am shooting, when I am in the field and after game animals I am hunting. Bottom line.

Funny, I've been asking the same question of myself lately. I don't enjoy being a "shooter".

If you don't enjoy being a shooter, get out & spot & stalk. I go nuts sitting on a stand for ,more than a couple hours. So it's glass, spot & stalk, hunting.

In my younger days, I would hunt three states. I remember the year I had 4 deer tags, and filled them after hunting a total of 4 days. It was one of the most disappointing year I had. After spending many days scouting and practicing, I felt the season cheated me.
Following that year, I selected one tag that I would only fill with a super trophy, it this case, If the Mule Deer buck had a spread of less than 30 inches, I let it walk.
There were a couple regrets, a couple of dandy bucks I killed, and a bunch of unfilled tags, but this made me a much wiser hunter (you have to change your hunting style to consistently get to the big ones).
The deer I saw back then, the ones that outsmarted me, and the ones that I outsmarted, the memories will last a lifetime.
I like the idea of changing your weapon, but another option is to raise your standards.

quote:

Most of the time I feel like a shooter on a guided hunt ...

That's because you are the shooter.

What you describe is the point of maturity in a hunter when he needs to move on from centerfire rifle to primitive weapons. The regression would be from high-power rifle to inline muzzleloader to percussion rifle to flintlock to compound bow to recurve to longbow to ...

As an aside, British nomenclature has shooting, stalking and hunting as completely different activities from what we generally call hunting. "Shooting" is killing high driven birds with a shotgun. "Stalking" is getting close to a game animal on foot and then shooting it with a high-power rifle. "Hunting" is chasing foxes on horseback with hounds.

Hard Luck,

If you're looking for a hunt, it sounds like you've only found "shooting" but if you're looking for deer steaks I say take what you can get from the stand on that field and go hunting some other way afterwards!

When I get an easy one, I tell myself it's to make up for a difficult one.

Ditto on the enjoyment/appreciation theme in this thread.

Nothing to add, as I'm still quite green, but neat thread you older fellows have going. Really. After 8 years of hunting MA (no CF rifles for deer) I wish I had some of the 'problems' and 'disapointments' on occasion, having in that time killed exactly one doe. I had percussion gun wonkiness cost me shots at two bucks over the years, but at least one was operator error. I guess over the next 40 odd years I hope to build up some regret and guilt with lucky kills and be able to chime in with some of my own...

I have learned, however, that almost always it is the *hunt* that I love so much, and not necessarily any particular success in taking game on an outing. Every time out, I learn something new or find something beautiful. Or both. OK, that'll do, before I really start boring folks.

Cheers,

KG

quote:

When I go to a range and shoot targets I am shooting, when I am in the field and after game animals I am hunting. Bottom line.

Ditto.

I doesn't matter how you do it, if you are after game in any way, you are hunting.

I grew up hunting in an area much like you described. You had to be on top of your game and only a few deer were spotted each season and to take even a doe was total excitement around camp.

Now we've managed those same lands into better deer habitat w/ much higher population but, I still hunt them just like I did years ago. I get out and find the sign where the big boy is and I move in as scent free as possible w/ my climber or I just sit on the ground. It doesn't matter which weapon I take, bow, MLer, or rifle, I do the scouting and hunting the same. w/ a bow, I just get closer to the trail.


Definition of Hunting in the dictionary:

The activity or sport of pursuing game.

Occasionally I sit on a long gas line ROW and hunt deer. It's still hunting no matter how you look at it.

Good Luck

Reloader

Thank you for so many thoughtful and helpful replys. Since I still scout and try to figure out the big boys I guess I'm still a hunter. When the shot comes, I've been praticed so much it sometimes seems too easy. I think I will go back to those forests and try to sneak up on a squirrel. A fellow once mentioned, 50 yrs ago if you can walk quitely enough in dry leaves so as not to scare sguirrels then you are doing it right. Again, thanks for all your wonderful comments.

quote:

A fellow once mentioned, 50 yrs ago if you can walk quitely enough in dry leaves so as not to scare sguirrels then you are doing it right. Again, thanks for all your wonderful comments.

You got that right!


We've got a bumper crop of cat squirrels around here and it has just gotten too easy to get them w/ a scatter gun so, the past few seasons I've opted to take my 22lr. I usually only hunt them once because we don't eat any more than that in a year. Bagged a limit of 8 last season on opening morning w/ my Marlin 60. Thinking about taking my old Benjamin 22cal pellet rifle this season to give it a little more sport.

Have a good one

Reloader

quote:

If you don't enjoy being a shooter, get out & spot & stalk. I go nuts sitting on a stand for ,more than a couple hours. So it's glass, spot & stalk, hunting.

Thanks but maybe I should explain. I live in the South Georgia swamps and hunt there too, there is no such thing as glassing deer here. You pattern deer and set up on them OR you slip hunt. I have done both. I've killed deer with my rifle, bow, and muzzleloader.

The problem is where I hunt, the largest deer EVER taken on the Coast of Georgia scored about 150 Non-Typical B&C. A typical great buck down here will push 100 B&C and probably weighs no more than 140 pounds. Of course you have your exceptions. My cousin held a County Record for years and his deer scored 115 B&C and only weighed 160 lbs. Our deer just aren't that big.

I like to go to other places to hunt because lets face it, the size of the rack definately makes my heart thump a lot harder. I go to Oklahoma every year on a guided hunt on private land of a friends that I just love. This will be my 3rd year in a row and the deer there are freakish midwestern deer. Bucks weighing over 250 lbs are standard sized deer and a 120 B&C buck is about average. For me that is pretty unreal considering I am just not used to deer that size.

So when I go on a guided hunt, typically the stands are already set up and I am glassing deer and playing the wait and set-up game. Not much stalking involved. We get there the day before the hunt and glass deer all afternoon and then make our decision as to which area to hunt based on what we see. You can see for miles there and looking at Wheat fields 2 miles away at deer is not uncommon.

Last year I glassed 6 bucks in one field the day before the hunt in the evening hours with little light. I saw 3 large eight points the biggest was mid 130 class. I saw two ten pointer at 140 and 150 class. And then I saw a serious Booner of a deer that probably would have made the record books. They were all walking along the edge of another field in two parallel ditches with a barbed wire fence between them to the Wheat field.

So I set up in the morning down on a small strip of planted wheat along the route they came from hoping that I would catch them in the morning going back to bed down near a river bottom. The stand already existed, I just sat in it. The afternnoon's I hunted the edge of the field waiting.

By day 3 I had only saw the three 8-points (saw them almost like clockwork every hunt) and not once laid eyes on anythign else. I had switched locations only twice, but both those times I didn't see any bucks, so I came back to these two stands. By the 4th morning, I took the largest of the 8 points. The deer scored just over 130 and weighed about 270lbs.

I still felt like I was a shooter and not a hunter. I didn't place the stand. I didn't really scout the deer because you don't have a lot of time and I don't know the land.

This year I am going back with a plan. I'm going to watch the deer movement on the first afternoon and then hunt from movable ground blinds. I feel this is more sporting and I will get more out of it.

But regardless, I constantly ask myself what is the difference between hunting and shooting. Its a personal question. What I described above borders on both for me, but I am sure is hunting to some, and shooting to some as well.

If it is not your land and you don't have time to scout, how do you turn your experience into one of hunting and not a shoot?

My neighbor says I am a killer not a hunter! He says it in a good way though as he knows I scout so I am in the right spot to see the most deer that I can. It just happens to be that spot means that I will most likely put my shooting skills to the test on what the average hunter in my neck of the woods calls a long shot. I hunt farmland and hunt hill side to hill side, watching not only fields but treelines and other natural funnels. It don't bore me at all. My favorite part of the hunt is the shot.