The question “Can hunters be nature’s best friend?” is complicated but not without encouraging answers
Two passive, former hunters—one an enthusiastic, responsible local “by-the-book” sportsman, another a prolific and popular Western naturalist, historian, and book author—and this reporter share personal insights and team for a discussion about how responsible individuals (sportspeople, if you will) adhere to the rules and limits imposed to handle and “manage” the hunt.
There’s something primal about taking to the woods and wetlands in search of elusive game. Setting aside for a moment the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, many people choose to hunt wildlife to keep intrusive species in check and the freezer full. Answers to the questions posed here are as varied and variable as licensed state-government seasons, trespassing rules, and bag limits across the nation. The hunt can be quite a responsibility, and the subject itself in this context is wrought with all sorts of opinions and complicated definitions of exactly what a sportsman or sportswoman really is. Some hunters define the pursuit as sound stewardship of the land and a deep appreciation of nature. This reporter was at one time a hunter and can testify to the enormous obligation it is to follow the rules and laws. In short, why do people hunt?
German short hair bird dog with pheasant.
A Sika buck does the classic deer response by stopping and looking back to find out what just made the strange sound.
My own hunting experience was a checkered one. Early on, I hunted (and was expected to do so) with my dad in the fields and fencerows around my house about a half-hour from the Mason-Dixon Line. The quarry in small-game season was mostly rabbits and pheasants (the latter regrettably now depleted by field chemicals and over-hunting). My father could see the pheasants and rabbits sitting on the ground, continuing to urge me to “aim for their noses.” Which would have been sound advice if only I could have seen the animals myself. We usually bagged our “limit.” For some reason, my father never, to my knowledge, hunted for anything larger than the “small game” we pursued together, with our state-issued licenses also giving us the opportunity to hunt for deer, which we never did together.
When I married after college, I went for larger game (no correlation intended). We referred to the first day of male deer (buck) season as “World War III,” with the hunters descending on presumably private property or state game preserves. I had a perfect promontory behind my in-laws’ house, giving me the luxury of a ready-made hunting spot in the woods. In the morning of my first day of deer hunting, I mistakenly shot a doe, a female white-tail deer. Being the responsible hunter I thought I was, I immediately “field dressed” the deer and called the local Game Commission office, which sent a warden. “Well, it looks like you shot the wrong kind,” he said, as he wrote me a citation. He then took the female (or antlerless deer, which has its own season) heaved it into the back of his truck. So, not only had I been issued a citation (and hefty fine), but I wasn’t allowed to keep the deer for my own consumption. I was told later that in such situations, “wrong-kind” kills were routinely donated to needy known families or anonymous food banks. I later ultimately decided on what deer hunting meant to me. More on that later.
For Sport, Harvest…Both
Also contributing to this story were Steve Flynn from Edgewater (who has rechanneled pretty much altogether his taste for killing wildlife, owing in part to his own health issues) and Tom Barnes of Dorchester on the Eastern Shore, a 30-year member of Ducks Unlimited who still fires weapons for sport but no longer hunts avidly. This is the point at which Barnes introduced me to the term “marsh ghosts” when referring to Maryland’s Sika “deer,” which aren’t deer after all, but wily miniature versions of elk.
“Steve and I started leasing a farm near St. Michaels around 2004 or 2005 with two other guys,” Barnes tells us. “Every year, I contact the owner of the land to make sure everything is still all set for us for the upcoming season. He usually says, ‘I really appreciate you guys. I’ve had parties on that property who go in, kill a deer, chop off the head, and leave the carcass behind.’ He said the same thing happens with geese.”
Neither Flynn nor Barnes hunts as much these days in the traditional sense anymore, attributing their decision to waning interest in the prospect altogether—almost. We also spoke to Rob Ranes, who seemingly lives to hunt and thus also hunts to live, if his packed freezer is any indication. Ranes reflected for this story, “I follow all laws and limits, and it’s a lot to take in. The state of Maryland has many regulations in two different zones for deer and turkey. I hunt in both the western and eastern parts of the state, so I have to be up on regulations for both.
A boat canal in the Deal Island Wildlife Management Area, Maryland, provides marsh access for hunters. The marshes of Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore are prime hunting habitats.
“I hunt with bow, rifle, and shotgun, and I never hunt out of season. All the guys who hunt with me go by the book. But I live by the call-in honor system Maryland has for deer. Some people will call in deer that they haven’t harvested just so they can shoot two bucks. Maryland has a law that if a hunter shoots a buck, he must shoot two doe in order to qualify for harvesting a second buck. It’s very hard to pass up a big buck when you’ve already harvested one. Believe me, I’ve been there,” Ranes laments.
“Hunting deer helps both farmers and the deer,” he says, “and a host of diseases also kill deer that spread to populated areas. The deer must be thinned out to survive. My hunting group once found seven deer dead because of water-borne bacteria.
“I hunt ducks and geese with a shotgun. One of the funniest things that’s happened to me was when I shot a drake wood duck and then a hen, which fell into the blind and landed on my friend. We still joke about that all the time. I’ve hunted Blackwater Bay and Fishing Bay for Sika deer, but the best places are the tiny islands in Dorchester County. It’s definitely the hardest hunt because of the flies and mosquitos. In most places, you need to wear chest waders. It’s a real challenge.”
What about sika deer? we asked rhetorically. “I love sika deer,” Ranes told us. “You can pass by a sika and not even know it, if they will hold tight in thick cover—not like a whitetail. You can walk right past a sika.”
A True Good Friend of Nature
For this story, we also went straight to one of the foremost thinkers about it all, acclaimed author and sportsman Paul Schullery, self-described as “someone who’s devoted much of my professional career (the lion’s share of it in Yellowstone National Park) to the big questions of how we relate to nature,” he recalls.
Schullery contends that sportsmen “have had an enormous and continuing influence for good in both nature appreciation and the conservation movement.” He adds that “among large portions of the public they (hunters) are still not given sufficient credit for their contributions.”
There is a huge and almost venerable body of literature, both popular and scholarly, on differing approaches to “appreciating” or “loving” or “being the best friend” of nature (Schullery told us he called his history of Yellowstone Park, Searching for Yellowstone, because we keep reconsidering what nature even is and how we should come to terms with it). In the realm of historical perspectives on where hunting fits in modern human relationships with nature, Schullery mentioned two books that he thinks set a framework for thinking about the debate. He offers them only as “examples of the state-of-the-discussion in modern times.”
First, a milestone and still controversial scholarly book, historian John Reiger’s American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, originally published in 1976 and now in its third or fourth revised edition, is a primary landmark in modern discussions of this issue. It laid out much of the frankly irrefutable historical evidence that late-19th-century sportsmen were a significant leading political and social force in the rise of a conservation movement.
Second, Daniel Herman’s Hunting and the American Imagination (2001), a much broader and necessarily more nuanced study, established among other things that over the course of the 19th century and into the early 20th century, leading thinkers of the American hunting culture slowly redefined themselves, going from “kill-’em-all” slaughterers to forward-thinking conservationists who made use of the best available science in their approaches to nature.”
But it’s important for perspective, Schullery warns, “to keep in mind that though sportsmen love to invoke those leaders, the great names—Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, Aldo Leopold, and so on—they often do so to the exclusion of paying enough attention to the other less heroic or savory opinions and behavior in the ranks. Just the fact that state and federal management agencies must employ battalions of wardens and rangers, and that poaching is still such a huge problem everywhere, is all the proof needed that hunters aren’t all mindfully united, which is the biggest reason that sweeping generalizations about how wonderful hunters are simply won’t serve the discussion here.”
It’s a Personal Decision
Paul Schullery is the author, co-author, or editor of more than 40 books and numerous articles with titles including The Bears of Yellowstone, The Grand Canyon, American Bears, Mountain Time, Searching for Yellowstone, America’s National Parks, Real Alaska, Lewis and Clark Among the Grizzlies, and This High, Wild Country.
Getting back to this reporter’s own “big-game” hunting experience, one incident has served to eliminate altogether the thought of hunting as a “sport.” The principal and personal reasons for hunting are as varied as the personalities of those who pull the trigger. My last hunting experience was a deeply personal incident that even affected any thoughts of occupying a duck blind waiting for the birds to fly directly into the shooters’ line of sight. For me, that just wasn’t hunting. It was more an exercise of waiting. Somehow, it just wasn’t real for me.
My final deer-hunting experience was so disturbing to me that, despite the good that hunters do in being good stewards and nature’s best friend, it turned out to be my last reckoning with the shooting sports. On that outing, I was standing on a dead tree stump at the aforementioned spot in the woods behind my in-laws’ house, when a deer walked just past me, and I took a shot. As I jumped off the stump, the deer had slumped to the ground, then taken off running down the hill. I then soon heard a second shot, hoping another hunter had put the poor thing out of its misery. I tracked blood spots on the fallen leaves for about a quarter-mile, but never came upon a wounded deer, nor a hunter. I had hoped that the shot I heard had put it down, but I had no evidence of it, and I had visions of the creature bleeding to death in the woods. It was my final deer hunt.
All this is meant in the spirit in which it was written. Hunting is a personal thing, and for the most part, hunters are, indeed, in their own ways, “stewards of the land” and often also simultaneously, “nature’s best friend,” this latter assertion being a principal reason that most people hunt, anyway.
