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The Latest Tips, Tricks, And Advice from Master Outdoorsman Jerome B. Robinson

fieldandstream-editor — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 01:30:00 -0400

How to Raise a Hunter

fieldandstream-editor — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 04:15:00 -0500

Table of Contents

Online Exclusive:More resources to help young hunters

The Story: By Kieth Mccafferty
You can't force your child to be a sportsman. But if you find the right way to share your love for the outdoors with him or her, you can create the best hunting partner you'll ever have. Here is one man's story of how he did it. ... Read More

A Love of the Wild: By T. Edward Nickens
To pass along a passion for wildlife and a strong conservation ethic, you need to instill in your kids an understanding of animals that has more to do with science than Disney. Pair that with your own enthusiasm for the woods, and the result will be a lifelong awe of the wild-and a conservation ethic that makes itself known in the field and at the polls ... Read More

The Safest Sport: By Philip Bourjaily
As an overprotective modern parent who gets nervous when my kids ride bicycles to a friend's house, I would not teach my children to hunt if I thought it were dangerous. Better they have a gun in their hands, than, say, a skateboard. Hunting and shooting have low accident rates precisely because we place so much emphasis on gun safety. Although hunting should be fun, teaching kids to be safe shooters doesn't call for much sense of humor. Treat the topic seriously, and children will respond to the gravity in your voice. ... Read More

Do the Right Thing: By Bill Heavey
You can't treat "teach son hunting ethics" as another item on your Saturday to-do list. Helping a child develop a healthy respect for the wild and a hunter's place in it is a matter of character, and that is not created overnight. Raising an ethical child is a long process, like building a rock dam across a creek. You have to thoughtfully choose and place the stones, a single one at a time. ... Read More

Coping with Killing: By David E. Petzal
If you give a youngster a tennis racket or a soccer ball or a baseball bat, you can teach him or her about sportsmanship and competition. If you give a boy or girl a gun, you teach that child about life and death. People who kill things can be more reverential of life than people who do not. The person who causes creatures' deaths and watches them struggle against it has an intimate knowledge of the tragedy of life departing. Nonhunters choose to ignore the fact that animals must die in order for us to eat, and hold forth on the cruelty of hunting while wolfing down veal scallopini that a week earlier was a terrified calf bawling in a slaughterhouse. Death is part of life for us and for all things. ... Read More

Beyond Hunter Ed: Programs That Keep Kids in the Field: By Philip Bourjaily
Congratulations, your child has passed hunter education and has a solid grounding in safety and ethics. Now what? There's so much more to learn, and the next steps are critical; as many as one-third of those who finish the class don't hunt the next year. If your young charge is all cammied up with no place to go, check out these state and private programs. ... Read More

How to Raise a Hunter

fieldandstream-editor — Fri, 31 Dec 1999 19:00:00 -0500

He would need what help I could give him. I had come to hunting when it was accepted as a natural part of a boy's upbringing, when it took little more effort than setting down the books after school and changing from one jacket into another before slamming the back door. My own son or daughter would be brought up in a world of suburban sprawl and organized play, where just getting to the woods took time and planning. Then, too, he would have to contend with a nation that secured its protein under plastic wrap while casting disapproving eyes at a marginalized tradition. A part of me wondered if it was worth the effort to indoctrinate someone into a culture so archaic that its followers took note of the lunar cycle, when the majority of people systematically insulated themselves from nature, scarcely noting even the stars.

But this was just one dark thought in a night of little sleep, and when I hiked out of the basin to help bring a child into the world a few days later it was with a lighter heart.

Sensitive Start
From the beginning, Tom seemed bent to his own path. Despite baby photos my wife, Gail, took of me holding him in the crook of one arm and a Hawken rifle in the other (there also was a Godfather-inspired photo I snapped involving a severed elk head-that one Gail promptly burned), my son's nature seemed to lead in a direction opposite of hunting. Although athletic, he was a small boy, lost in the clod-hopping melee of the soccer field, where he could be found contemplating the clouds more often than kicking at the ball. Naturally introspective, he formed an identity very early as an artist. His favorite medium became watercolors, his favorite subjects the moose, elk, bear, and bison we saw on trips to Yellowstone Park. The animals were beautifully rendered, presented in anthropomorphized portraits like pet dogs or horses, with simple color washes for backgrounds. Missing was the habitat, the context of the animal in its natural environ that the hunter looks for, and the predator-prey dynamic that drives nature's engine.

Once when he was 4 or 5 years old, my wife and I found him standing quietly in the garage, awkwardly patting the thick coat of a cow elk I had shot, which was hanging from a gambrel roped to a rafter.

"Good ulk," he said. "Good ulk."

Gail motioned to me to back away. "Tom's so softhearted," she said when we were alone.

"Will it disappoint you if he doesn't hunt?"

I told her it wouldn't and almost meant it. I understood that the wishes I sent with that arrow were selfish, and like most new parents, I had quickly discovered that all that really mattered to me was his health and happiness. My only regrets if he didn't hunt would be that he might not know me better, nor share with me the bonds that hunting engenders. My own father's life had been shaped by family tragedy, the Great Depression, and war, and at times it made him distant. But his voice was more relaxed on the days we were afield, and there was less stress in the hand that guided the swing when I hefted a shotgun or that led me across the deep part of the river. We were closest then, and a part of me couldn't release the hope that something of the same thread would someday connect Tom with me.

Philosophy Lessons
My quest to raise a hunter was helped by living in Montana. Antler tines poking above pickup rails were everyday sights in autumn, unremarked and unfrowned upon, and in our home venison was not only a sacrament of the hunt but the only red meat we ate. I like to think that when Gail said a blessing at holiday dinners, giving thanks to the antelope or elk that had given its life for our sustenance, Tom listened.

Once, when Tom was approaching hunting age and it was just the two of us on a long drive to visit family near the Canadian border, I surprised myself by talking to him about the sport as if he wermy contemporary. This took courage, because if he rejected my feelings on the subject, in a way he would be rejecting me. I started by explaining the cycles in nature, the notion of an animal's demise and decomposition enriching the soil. I told him that in death there is life, and that to me hunting was a way of keeping an ear to the earth and submersing myself into the bloodstream of the wilderness. I tried to make him understand that every corner of the dinner plate was the same, and that even the strictest vegetarian participated, if unknowingly, in clearing the land and eliminating deer and other animals that would otherwise live there. To be human was to kill. That was unavoidable. What mattered were the ethical underpinnings of hunting-killing with respect to the unwritten as well as the written rules. A hunter, a man who lived up to my definition anyway, adhered to the ethics of fair chase, killed cleanly, never took more than he needed, and honored the animal by not letting its meat go to waste. I went on for quite a while. He nodded, giving me his shy smile. Afterward, I thought I had just been talking to myself. Later, however, I would hear Tom repeat my arguments to doubters almost word for word. But whether he would ever feel a surge of blood upon seeing tracks in the snow, the pounding heart that binds us so purposely to the past-that was something only time could tell.

In the meanwhile we fished, a blood sport untarnished by the sight of blood, or much of it, anyway. But fishing is the same persistent probing under the surface that hunting is, and Tom took to it as naturally as I had. He became adept with a fillet knife, which encouraged me, for when I was growing up it had not been much of a step from cleaning bluegills for the skillet to peeling the skins off the squirrels Dad shot for my grandmother's gravy. But I knew better than to press, recalling an autumn day with my father when I had retrieved a rabbit that with its last gasp had blown a bubble of blood from its lips. The sight had affected me at a time when I had been keen to hunt, and for a month afterward I was content to listen to the beagle circle closer without feeling any urge to cock the hammers of the .410 shotgun I had found under the Christmas tree.

New Adventures
At 7 or 8, Tom started to accompany me on day hunts, usually when I carried a bow. In retrospect I see this as the best preparation for hunting I could have exposed him to. For a boy, streaking paint across his face and donning camouflage clothing was like taking part in a secret adventure. The weather was better in September than during the rifle season, and Tom could participate rather than just blindly follow. He could scream into a grunt tube to produce realistic bugles and every once in a while have the thrill of hearing an elk answer. There were many opportunities to experience the excitement of the hunt without the confusion that can follow a kill.

Two hunts stand out in my memory as formative, the first during a rare, early-autumn snow. Coming upon tracks, I told Tom they had been made by a cow and a calf elk and that if we followed for a quarter mile and then circled up and into the wind, we would find those elk bedded in a thicket on the shoulder of the hill. He was skeptical; to the uninitiated, tracks carry a surreal quality unassociated with the probability that animals might actually be standing at the end of them. When the tan bodies flickered silently away through the tree trunks a half hour later, my stature as a hunter, as far as Tom was concerned, rose considerably. Furthermore, he now saw that hunting could be a form of chess, a game that appealed to his intellect, but one that made the heart beat so much harder than any game played on a table.

Another time, we were hunting down the spine of a ridge when Tom spotted a buck in the apron of woods under the crest. It was nosing our way between mouthfuls of sedges, and I could hear excited intakes of breath beside me as the gap closed. At 20 yards I drew the bow, but a voice inside my head stopped me from loosing the arrow.

"Why didn't you shoot?" he asked after the buck had bounded away.

"I just didn't feel like it," I told him. "You don't have to shoot just because you can." Throwing the words over my shoulder as we hiked down the ridge, I made the point as nonchalantly as I could. Later, on the drive back, I told him about the Indian notion of counting coup, touching a sleeping enemy to claim bloodless victory. "Sort of like that," I said. "You don't shoot the deer, you can keep on hunting. We come up here next month, we don't shoot unless it feels right. We can just hunt and maybe get one next year."

Was he ready to actually hunt himself? I thought he was, though when we had taken hunter education together the previous spring, the field dressing video had set back the clock a bit. "How did it go?" my wife asked afterward. And while I rolled my eyes, Tom demonstrated the gutting technique, the "gobs of gray goo spilling out," as he put it. "Hun-ugh," he said, screwing up his face the same way he had when my brother and I had put one over on him during a bowhunt, acting as if we were chewing elk pellets to judge their freshness. "There's no way, no way I'm doing that." But he was laughing when he said it.

By this time his painting had evolved. There were backgrounds now of plain and forest. The animals were alert, the ears of the antelope cocked forward, the African lion holding a paw poised to strike. Still, as the Hunter's Moon waned on his 12th birthday, an important part of his education remained missing. I had been so sensitive to his nature that except for birds and small game, he had never witnessed the natural conclusion of the chase.

First Blood
On opening day of the rifle season, Tom and I were hidden in a haystack blind, the grainfield flaring in the sunset, when whitetails danced out to feed. At my shot one of the does collapsed, stirring a forefoot as the flags went up from the others. Tom was surprised that she wore nothing but a dime of blood on her shoulder. Then, as he held her legs and I opened her with the knife, he saw the lungs turned to pulp inside the chest cavity and the death became very real to him. He was silent for most of the drive home.

Finally he spoke. "It's okay. We'll eat the meat. It's not like they're an endangered species."

"Do you still want to shoot a deer this year?"

He shrugged, a movement I sensed more than saw, and I didn't probe further.

By mid-November the snow swirled deep in the Bridger Mountains. The butt of the rifle slung over Tom's shoulder dragged through the drifts. His oversize mesh vest swept the snow behind him like the train of some blaze-orange wedding dress. When we sts of sedges, and I could hear excited intakes of breath beside me as the gap closed. At 20 yards I drew the bow, but a voice inside my head stopped me from loosing the arrow.

"Why didn't you shoot?" he asked after the buck had bounded away.

Finally he spoke. "It's okay. We'll eat the meat. It's not like they're an endangered species."

"Do you still want to shoot a deer this year?"

He shrugged, a movement I sensed more than saw, and I didn't probe further.

A Love of the Wild

fieldandstream-editor — Fri, 31 Dec 1999 19:00:00 -0500

To pass along a passion for wildlife and a strong conservation ethic, you need to instill in your kids an understanding of animals that has more to do with science than Disney. Pair that with your own enthusiasm for the woods, and the result will be a lifelong awe of the wild-and a conservation ethic that makes itself known in the field and at the polls.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 1:"]
Bring critters home alive
Frogs, turtles, salamanders, snakes, june bugs, praying mantises, juvenile bass and bream-my kids have kept watch over an impressive array of wild-caught creatures adopted, temporarily, into their care. Bring the critters home and you will likely not abet a salmonella or rabies epidemic or harm animal populations. What you will do is foster an appreciation for the animals themselves-not just wildlife as a concept-and teach your kids that there are valid, valuable ways to interact with them other than with a trigger. Keep two 3-gallon aquariums with close-fitting wire-screen tops. At my house, we have a seven-day rule: Animals are returned to their natural habitat within a week of capture. That way, they make it back without undue stress.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 2:"]
Pass up the shot
Pulling the trigger should be a choice. For most hunters, there comes a time when you let the deer walk not because it's a scrawny 6-point buck. You pass up the shot because this particular animal has a regal demeanor you've never seen before, and though yesterday or tomorrow you wouldn't think twice about putting a bullet in its lungs, this morningÂ¿Â¿Â¿no. Let your son or daughter see you demonstrate what you drill into their heads: It's not about the killing. You may find it hard to describe what you're feeling when you let an animal walk, but with your kid there beside you, you should try.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 3:"]
Save some habitat
Volunteer a day or two with your young hunters and they'll gain a greater appreciation for the challenges facing wildlife and the opportunities for lending a hand. A good first step is to contact a national wildlife refuge nearby. Many use volunteers to maintain trails, plant native vegetation, and assist with bird censusing and other get-your-hands-dirty activities. Such work instills an ethic of investment in a place. It's a big world out there, and there are ways to impact it in a big way.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 4:"]
bring critters home dead
For young kids, particularly, hunting needs to be viewed as an integral and customary part of life-not something Dad or Mom do "out there." Bring the ducks, squirrels, and deer home. Let the kids handle the birds. Describe the difference between primary and secondary wing feathers. Give them antlers to play with. Clean a few skulls and let them start a collection. By bringing game into the home you break the invisible boundary between the world we inhabit as humans and the world beyond the sidewalk.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 5:"]
Be a bird nerd
Or at least try to be. Take the kids outdoors with binoculars and seine nets instead of guns and bows. Go on long hikes and turn over every downed log. Join a local birding group. Learn the calls of frogs and toads in your region. The more your kids know about nature, the more they'll understand science-based wildlife management. And the more you teach them now, the better they'll one day be able to put into words-and action-their love for wildlife and wild places and wet retrievers and deer in the crosshairs for another critical audience: their own kids. -T. Edward Nickens

The Safest Sport

fieldandstream-editor — Fri, 31 Dec 1999 19:00:00 -0500

As an overprotective modern parent who gets nervous when my kids ride bicycles to a friend's house, I would not teach my children to hunt if I thought it were dangerous. Better they have a gun in their hands, than, say, a skateboard. Hunting and shooting have low accident rates precisely because we place so much emphasis on gun safety. Although hunting should be fun, teaching kids to be safe shooters doesn't call for much sense of humor. Treat the topic seriously, and children will respond to the gravity in your voice.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 1:"]
Demystify guns
Young boys, especially, find guns fascinating. Keeping guns forbidden and mysterious only increases their allure. Let your kids handle your guns with your permission and under your supervision. Show them how to check whether the chamber and magazine are empty. Let them point the gun in a safe direction. Teach them now that the only time they are ever to touch a trigger is when they want the gun to go off.

Take them to the gun club, where they will see targets smashed to bits. Show them the bloody holes your guns put into the animals you bring home. A friend likes to impress new shooters with the power of firearms by shooting a cantaloupe at 10 paces with a 12-gauge. The distinction between real and toy guns will be as clear as the difference between real and toy cars.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 2:"]
Give them a BB gun
Owning a BB gun can teach children good safety habits or bad ones. Kids of my generation roamed the woods with Red Ryders and no parental supervision. There's a better way. Give a child a BB gun a year or so before he or she is ready to start shooting .22s and 20-gauges. Store it with your guns and make a point of treating it like a real gun-which it is. Let your young hunter bring it along, unloaded, on short hunts with you. Insist that he carry it with the muzzle pointed in a safe direction. Pack a few BBs along for some safe target shooting at the end of the day.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 3:"]
Spend time at the range
The more often you take your children shooting, the more practiced they'll become in handling guns safely. At the range, insist that muzzles point up, down, or downrange-always. Keep control of the ammunition yourself, and dole out shells one at a time. Kids will be scrupulously careful about muzzle control until they fire a shot. In the excitement of hearing the gun go off, they will turn to you, swinging the gun, or drop it down so it points at their toes. If the gun is empty, it's a teachable moment, not a potential tragedy. Insist on eye and ear protection, and emphasize its importance by always wearing it yourself.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 4:"]
Pick first hunts carefully
Your first real hunts should be for squirrels, waterfowl, deer, turkeys, or doves, sedentary hunts where the game comes to you. Leave your own gun at home. Sit right with your hunter, whispering advice and giving the go-ahead to take the safety off and shoot. Save upland hunting for last. It requires walking with a loaded gun for long periods as well as split-second shoot-or-don't-shoot decisions.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 5:"]
lead by example
You're trying to instill lifelong safety habits, and nothing you say speaks as loudly as your own actions when you and your child hunt together. Handle your own guns with extra emphasis on safety. While we're at it, boats, ATVs, tree stands, and motor vehicles can be just as deadly as guns if used carelessly. Your young hunter will learn all about them by watching you. -Philip Bourjaily

Do the Right Thing

fieldandstream-editor — Fri, 31 Dec 1999 19:00:00 -0500

You can't treat "teach son hunting ethics" as another item on your Saturday to-do list. Helping a child develop a healthy respect for the wild and a hunter's place in it is a matter of character, and that is not created overnight. Raising an ethical child is a long process, like building a rock dam across a creek. You have to thoughtfully choose and place the stones, a single one at a time.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 1:"]
Show interest in your kid's opinions
Sincere parental attention makes a son or daughter feel loved, important, and powerful. So listen when yours talks to you about hunting, but not the way you do when your wife talks about how the grass out front is so long she can no longer find her car. This calls for active listening. Make eye contact, put yourself in your child's shoes, and acknowledge the points your young hunter is making. If you want to go for the Gold Star Listening Award, wait until your kid has finished, restate your understanding of what you've heard, ask if you've got it right, then keep the conversation going. If you aren't really interested, fake it; then go get your head examined because you have no business being a parent.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 2:"]
Teach them that this is no game
Tell your young partner that nonhunters may think of hunting as a sport or recreation, but to you there is something sacred about it. Tell her that not so very long ago, families like yours prayed for success in the hunt because their survival hung in the balance. Explain that, even though your lives don't depend upon getting game now, you do feel that hunting feeds the spirit. This mindful act-the stalking, killing, dressing, and eating of the meat of an animal that has never known a cage or pen-has a mysterious way of creating a greater awareness of the miracle of your own existence. And that's why you want to share it.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 3:"]
Make up a ritual
After you've killed an animal, ask your son or daughter how the two of you could give thanks for it. You may pray to the Lord for having let you have a successful day hunting with your child. Or, like the Indians, you may acknowledge the animal's spirit, saying that you took its flesh not in anger or pride, but to feed your family so they may grow strong as it was strong. You may simply stroke its flank and say, "Thank you."

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 4:"]
donate venison to somebody who needs it
Mention to your kids that there are about 13 million children just like them in the United States who either go to bed hungry some nights or worry about not having enough to eat. Ask if you think it would be a good idea to give some of the meat from a hunt to such a family. Your state hunting guidebook will list organizations. If your child says yes, tell him how proud you are. If the answer is no, let him know that is a perfectly legitimate choice, too. You have to respect his right to make the decision.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 5:"]
praise your hunter
Every time you go afield, find something to praise about your kid's behavior-how she handled a firearm safely, helped dress the deer, remained quiet while on stand. Praise is a miracle drug for young people: It makes them stand up straighter, behave more responsibly, and act with more confidence. I'm not talking about flattery, which kids see through. Ethics is about respect, and the best way to teach it is to give it to them. Remember: In the long haul, your children aren't "yours" any more than the wild game is. They belong to themselves. Your job as a parent is to protect, love, and teach them as best you can until they are ready to leave you behind and go out into the world. -Bill Heavey

Coping with Killing

fieldandstream-editor — Fri, 31 Dec 1999 19:00:00 -0500

If you give a youngster a tennis racket or a soccer ball or a baseball bat, you can teach him or her about sportsmanship and competition. If you give a boy or girl a gun, you teach that child about life and death. People who kill things can be more reverential of life than people who do not. The person who causes creatures' deaths and watches them struggle against it has an intimate knowledge of the tragedy of life departing. Nonhunters choose to ignore the fact that animals must die in order for us to eat, and hold forth on the cruelty of hunting while wolfing down veal scallopini that a week earlier was a terrified calf bawling in a slaughterhouse. Death is part of life for us and for all things.

[BRACKET "Assignment no. 1:"]
Teach your kids that the concept of cruelty is alien to hunting
Hunting is part of nature. Predation is part of nature. Death is part of nature. To label any of these processes cruel is to impose particularly silly 21st-century human prejudices on phenomena that existed before men walked the earth. Nature is neither cruel nor benign. It simply is, and it doesn't care what we think about it.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 2:"]
Understand that children react differently to killing
If your boy shouts, "Wow, I killed him!" or something like that, there is nothing wrong with him-he is just a boy. But he should understand that what he just killed wanted to live as badly as he does, and that he should feel sorrow as well as triumph. Other children will not relish death. If they kill, they will likely be saddened by it. This is natural too. Some youngsters are horrified by death and by the prospect of causing it. They are not meant to be hunters. They are no less courageous or worthy than kids who itch to hunt-they are simply different, and you must respect that.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 3:"]
Teach kids that each death is a necessary tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless
Some kids never accept this-they love to see the bodies flop, and they become adults who love to see the bodies flop. Those people give me the creeps, and if I had such a youngster, I would suggest that he try some other sport.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 4:"]
Impress on your kid that if there is such a thing as a sin in hunting, it is wounding an animal
Make it clear to your kids that if they are not willing to give their all to becoming competent with gun or bow, they have no business afield. Explain to them also that if they hunt enough, they are eventually going to wound something, and it is going to escape to suffer. It may take two seasons for this to happen, or 50, but it is going to happen. All they can do is work at becoming as skilled as possible and hope it doesn't.

[BRACKET "Assignment No. 5:"]
Show them that they do not have to kill to enjoy hunting
It may take a couple of seasons for a young person to discover this, or it may take a lot longer. There is no substitute for success early in a hunter's life, and that means getting game. But show your kids that it shouldn't always be that way. Teach them that there is much to love about hunting even when you get no game. A friend of mine who has hunted for nearly 60 years went to Africa last year and although he brought a rifle, he did not fire a single shot. He was perfectly happy to look at the game and the stars and enjoy the success of other, younger hunters. That is the highest level at which hunting can be enjoyed. -David E. Petzal

Beyond Hunter Ed

fieldandstream-editor — Fri, 31 Dec 1999 19:00:00 -0500

Congratulations, your child has passed hunter education and has a solid grounding in safety and ethics. Now what? There's so much more to learn, and the next steps are critical; as many as one-third of those who finish the class don't hunt the next year. If your young charge is all cammied up with no place to go, check out these state and private programs. -Philip Bourjaily

[BRACKET "Youth Hunts:"]
Get them hooked on hunting at its best
In my home state of Iowa, kids used to start deer hunting by tagging along with the adults in the cold of the December shotgun season, traditionally a party-hunting, lead-slinging free-for-all. Now, Iowa holds a youth season in late September. The success rate runs near 50 percent, and hunter-satisfaction rates are even higher. Youth hunts are held across the country and let kids take center stage in a calm, controlled environment, and they're all about having fun. Besides special statewide seasons for a variety of game open to kids accompanied by unarmed adults, there are also limited-draw youth hunts on selected wildlife management areas. Contact your state's Department of Natural Resources for options (fieldandstream.com/dnrsites).

[BRACKET "Competitive Shooting:"]
Set their sights on trophies
Sparking an interest in marksmanship is generally not hard to do. The challenge is to maintain it over time. Competitions like these can do the trick:

4-H Shooting Sports (304-629-1809; 4-Hshootingsports.org) has grown so big it has become a stand-alone program with 300,000 participants in 50 states. You don't have to raise a pig or make a quilt to be eligible. As many as 300 young shooters attend the 4-H National Invitational for archery, rifle, shotgun, pistol, small-bore pistol, air rifle, and hunting-skills competitions.
The Daisy/U.S. Jaycees Shooting Education and Competition (U.S. Jaycees: 800-529-2337; www.usjaycees.org; and Daisy: 800-643-3458; daisy.com) sponsors local competitions for 250,000 kids between the ages of 10 and 14, leading up to the International BB Gun Championships, a three-position (standing, kneeling, prone) event shot with BB guns at 5 meters and air rifles at 10 meters.
The Civilian Marksmanship Program (419-635-2141; odcmp.com) administers three-position 10-meter air-gun matches for teams sponsored by American Legion posts; the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps; the National Guard Marksmanship Unit; Boy Scouts of America Venturing crews; 4-H Shooting Sports; and the USA Shooting Olympic program.
The Scholastic Clay Target Championships (203-426-1320; nssf.org), run by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, organizes trap, skeet, and sporting clays teams by school. With coaching from adult volunteers, 5,000 kids from 40 states compete seriously at the state and national levels.
The NRA Marksmanship Qualification Program (703-267-1505; nrahq.org) lets shooters of all ages work individually, at their own pace, to earn patches up to an "expert" level in a variety of shooting disciplines.

[BRACKET "Summer Camps:"]
Where kids become outdoorsmen
They exist for music, debate, weight loss, and golf-why not hunting? Many fish and game departments sponsor camps in conjunction with state chapters of the National Wildlife Federation, and a number of hunters' groups hold their own. Here are soome of the best:

Safari Club International's Apprentice Hunter Program (800-377-5399; safariclubfoundation.org) is a one-week course in hunting skills, field dressing, and gun care that culminates in an actual hunt for an exotic deer or Corsican ram. Currently, SCI runs the camps at two locations: Three Rivers, Michigan ($1,200), and Del Rio, Texas ($995; $895 for members). State SCI chapters can provide scholarships.
The Upland Bird Hunting Camp (218-682-2325; deep-portage.org), held at the Deep Portage Conservation Reserve in Hackensack, Minnesota, is sponsored by the Ruffed Grouse Society and Pheasants Forever. Campers take daily wingshooting practice and learn lessons in outdoor cooking, dog training, and bird habits and habitats. The six-day program costs $385.
Minnesota Deer Hunters Association Camps (800-450-3337; mndeerhunters.com) cover deer hunting (shooting, archery, field dressing, big-game ecology, wildlife management, and other skills) from an introductory to an advanced level. The weeklong programs are held at four locations in the state, including at Deep Portage, for $385. The MDHA maintains a scholarship fund for needy campers.
NRA Whittington Adventure Camps (505-445-3615; nrawc.org) teach pistol, rifle, shotgun, and muzzleloader skills, as well as orienteering, camp cooking, and trapping. Kids will burn lots of powder at the camp, held at the NRA's Whittington Center in New Mexico. Most will shoot 1,500 rounds apiece in a two-week session that costs $850.
The South Carolina Waterfowl Association's Camp Woodie (803-452-6001; scwa.org) holds 10 five-day sessions every summer, with instruction in conservation, calling, blind building, shooting, fishing, canoeing, and more for some 450 campers ages 8 and up. The fees are $300 for ages 8Â¿Â¿Â¿11 and $550 for 12Â¿Â¿Â¿16.

More resources to help young hunters

fieldandstream-editor — Fri, 31 Dec 1999 19:00:00 -0500

More resources to help young hunters

[BRACKET "Mentor Programs:"]
Volunteer hunting buddies
Single-parent families and overworked couples often have a hard time making room on their calendars to take kids into the field. And some youngsters with the hunting gene are born to nonhunting families or ones that can't afford the sport. Mentors are the answer-adult hunters who volunteer to teach a child to shoot and hunt.

Field Trips
Members of sportsmen's clubs and state chapters of national conservation organizations will often bring young hunters into the field. For example, the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission partners with the Great Plains Houndsmen to take city kids rabbit hunting with beagles.

Hunting Partners
A growing number of groups are matching kids to mentors for more than a single hunt. The state of Alabama's Share the Wonder and South Carolina's Take One, Make One programs pair adults with young hunters for year-round participation in hunting, fishing, and the shooting sports. Big Brothers Big Sisters has joined with some state wildlife agencies, Pheasants Forever, and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation to form Pass It On, which hooks interested kids up with "Bigs" who can take them hunting, fishing, and camping.

(Check with your DNR or contact local chapters of national groups through their headquarters. Pheasants Forever: 877-773-2070; pheasantsforever.org. National Wild Turkey Federation: 800-843-6983; nwtf.org. Ducks Unlimited: 800-453-8257; ducks.org. Quail Unlimited: 803-637-5731; qu.org. Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation: 800-225-5355; elkfoundation.org. Delta Waterfowl: 888-987-3695; deltawaterfowl.org.)