Forgiving Faux Paws : These Bowhunters Stalk Game That Never Runs Away--or Is Killed
The archer drew back on his bow. The deer, motionless, stared back with Orphan Annie eyes. Zing! The arrow struck home. The deer didn’t flinch.
Nearby, wild turkeys browsed the brush, while a bighorn sheep watched the panorama from the side of a hill. Wild pigs, mountain goats, mountain lions, bears--all were oblivious to several dozen bowmen moving methodically among them, taking their best shots.
But none would be served up on the table that night, unless someone had a taste for ethafoam. All of the creatures were dummies made from the self-sealing rubbery substance.
The Conejo Valley Archers’ Critter Shoot 3-D tournaments at Camarillo Regional Park use lifelike mannequins around the 40-acre range to provide simulated hunting situations for bowhunters, as well as non-hunters.
Half of the competitors will never draw their bows on real animals. They don’t care to. Don’t even have hunting licenses.
“We’re an archery club,” said Craig Fritz, the president. “We don’t promote hunting. There are a lot of ladies out here who couldn’t care less about bowhunting. They wouldn’t want to hurt an animal.”
Nevertheless, a few days before a recent event, Fritz started hearing reports of animal-rights groups threatening to picket, as they have harassed hunters in the field in recent years. He said he received one telephoned death threat.
Fritz found it all amusing, not only because the targets were dummies, but because the average game animal probably has a better chance of being struck by lightning than by an arrow. Bowhunters have notoriously low success ratios.
“About 1% in the (deer) zone where I hunt,” Fritz said.
But for many archers, the hunt is the point, not the kill. Rifles with telescopic sights can end hunts at 300 yards, but an archer’s hunt is only starting from that range. Sometimes he must stalk game for hours, staying quiet, staying downwind, until working within bow range of 30 to 50 yards.
“That’s a bonus all in itself, to be able to work that hard to do that,” Fritz said. “Not everybody cares to.
“The essence of archery is that you’re in tight with the animals. You have to interact with everything around you. If you scare a bunch of birds and the birds (flush), then you’ve alerted the deer and the deer runs away. If you get upwind of the deer, then he smells you and runs away again. Most of the time you spend taking photographs.”
But the range can’t simulate the animals’ security systems. The blank eyes look, but don’t see. No matter. Many use the tournaments to hone their aim for the real thing.
“A lot of guys are just starting and want to learn how to judge distances on animals,” Fritz said. “They can learn what they’re capable of doing.”
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Most states, California among them, have archery-only seasons for certain species. That’s an archer’s favorite time, because he can stalk an animal without worrying about bullets flying around.
“That experience is unbelievable,” Fritz said. “To be up on a mountain looking down into the city of Los Angeles or the San Fernando Valley, watching deer and coyotes and skunk and animals everybody thinks we don’t even have.”
Fritz has seen real deer, coyotes and other creatures wandering the archery range in the quiet hours when few archers are there, but no hunting is allowed there.
There are four divisions of competition: traditional, with no sights or mechanical assistance; finger (release), with sights; release, in which a cord device releases the bowstring, and compound bow, which allows sights, stabilizers to balance the bow, and wheels and cams on the string that double the draw strength provided by the archer.
The traditional archers tease the compound group for using “training wheels.” The targets are placed along the edges of the canyon and up the slopes. Sometimes there will be audio tapes of turkeys gobbling or big cats snarling. The archers rotate counter-clockwise around the 50 stations.
“Traditional shooters are faster,” Fritz said. “They just step up and shoot.”
One reason is that they are using only their own strength and can’t hold a drawn bow as long as a compound bow shooter, who can wait for the wind to die.
“As you draw a compound bow, there’s a point we call a ‘break-over’ when you’re pulling 20 pounds but shooting 40,” Fritz said.
That increases the range and especially helps older archers and kids.
Points are awarded from 10 for a shot through the heart to eight for a lung shot to five for a marginally mortal wound.
There are no extra points for a “Robin Hood”--splitting a competitor’s arrow.
“Good shooters can do it on purpose,” Fritz said. “I’ve seen it from 40 yards.”
The first station offers the option of shooting at a large buck on the left or the two-dimensional silhouette of a small doe on the right. The doe has a cutout in the vital area, where a shot scores 20 points.
The catch is that the doe is made of steel boilerplate, which will destroy any arrow that misses the cutout. Arrows cost from $3 to $18 apiece. A miss causes a ding audible for some distance to signal another wasted shot. By mid-day, the ground in front of the doe is littered with broken arrows.
It’s not hunting but, said Bill Vaughn of Camarillo, “You can get the adrenaline rush from the competition. Then you throw in a lot of fun things”--another ding resonated across the grounds--”like that.”
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Vaughn, who uses a traditional bow, made two remarkable long shots on a mountain sheep 120 yards away up a hill, placing two of six arrows in the lower shoulder. He had to allow not only for elevation by arcing his shots, but for a strong, gusting crosswind.
“Just lucky,” he said. “I used to shoot a compound (bow) and I got real good with that. You can stretch out your effective range to 50 yards, and that really increases your success rate. Right now I’m confident to 30 yards. Forty is where I draw the line. That’s what makes (a) traditional (bow) so much of a challenge.”
Vaughn is the club’s 3-D coordinator. He also is a hunter. And a veterinarian.
“One of my big things has been wildlife management,” he said. “I’ve seen wildlife starving and realized that when I shoot cleanly through their chest, it’s much more humane than starving. It’s almost as quick and painless as when we euthanize an animal.
“There’s nothing wrong with rifle hunting, if you want to put meat on the table. But where those guys see the game, our hunt’s just starting. My big thrill is seeing the deer on that hill, and (thinking), ‘How am I going to get over there? How am I going to stalk him?’ ”
Vaughn recently hunted deer in Colorado.
“I stalked some for 90 minutes within 50 yards and could never get close enough to get a shot before they saw me,” he said.
“With a gun, you can sit there ready to shoot--just pull the trigger. With a bow, once you get close enough, you still have a movement to do. You can’t sit there (holding the bowstring back).
“I got a nice bull elk about three years ago. We’d let him run and tracked him. There’s a sense of satisfaction . . . and also a sense of sadness. You feel all these emotions.
“The thing about archery, if you get that close and you don’t get a shot, you still have the experience. Those deer I missed in Colorado . . . I was excited for three hours afterward.”
Robert Torres of Ventura was shooting with his son Justin, 7.
“He gave up baseball for archery this year,” he said. “This is something we can do together.”
Torres also is a hunter, but when he hunts, he uses a traditional bow.
“I like to give the animal that (extra) chance,” he said.
“I got within 20 yards of an elk this year in Oregon. I was in the middle of a herd, but they were a little quicker than I was. I was scouting an area they’d been moving through when they came over a ridge.”
Torres suddenly discovered a bull elk looking over his shoulder.
“When I took the shot I was waiting for, the bull behind me jumped enough for the other one to look my way and pick me up. I just missed him.”
He wasn’t discouraged from bowhunting.
“My son and I go out a lot,” Torres said. “Sometimes we don’t even hunt. We just like to be out, enjoying the woods and looking at the animals.”
