Petersen's Bowhunting is the source for the tactics, tools, and techniques necessary for successful bowhunting. Get practical shooting tips and useful information on archery, equipment tests, clothing, and product evaluations.
The suburban neighborhood where I grew up — just 40 miles outside Boston, Mass. — was hardly the middle of nowhere. It contained no wilderness, yet it offered enough “wildness” to capture a young boy’s imagination. Behind my childhood home was a rather large — at least by suburban standards — section of woods containing a small swamp, a meandering stream and enough trees and boulders to make a fine natural playground. Toads and garter snakes were plentiful, as were salamanders under the rotting logs littering the forest floor. I can’t recall how many times I exasperated my mother by coming home covered in dirt after a fort-building expedition or soaked to the bone from slogging through the swamp in search of tadpoles, but I know it was plenty! In…
Thrill of the Hunt My most exciting spring bowhunt to date has to be the first turkey hunt I ever went on. A friend and I were set up in a cow pasture with a stand of white oaks to our back and a blind made of their fallen limbs around us. The pasture stretched away from our position for a few hundred yards, but it wasn’t more than 70 across. A hill in the middle of it sloped from our right to left, and we had roosted a few birds in the trees at its foot the night before. We were in position long before sunrise, my friend ready with his slate call to coax the birds down and out of the woods. Whether they would have played along…
When it comes to bows and arrows, you can be as simple or complex as you wish. For some people, the more they know about their equipment, the worse they shoot. For others, like me, the more knowledge we have, the more confident we are in our setup. Years ago, I started weighing each component and building my arrows as precisely as possible. First, I’d weigh each cut shaft, number the shaft and write that down. Then I’d move on to nocks, vanes, inserts, points, etc. This enabled me to see which components made up the most weight-consistent arrows. One or two grains of variance from one arrow to the next didn’t really make a difference, but if I put a heavy insert with a heavy nock with a heavy…
Nothing elicits fear from the hearts of whitetail hunting fanatics more than three dirty initials: CWD. We fear what we don’t understand, and Chronic Wasting Disease certainly has researchers and deer managers scratching their heads. As a professional wildlife biologist and hunting property manager, I talk to a lot of deer hunters, and it seems clear to me that the complex nature of CWD — combined with a plethora of misinformation floating around online — has resulted in the highest level of anxiety since this always-fatal disease was first identified 52 years ago . Yes, you read that right; it was January 1967 when CWD was first identified as a clinical disease in a captive mule deer at a Colorado Division of Wildlife research facility. In the years since, CWD…
When I started bowhunting, it was easy for a buck to become a legend. He appeared a few times during the summer in a hayfield near the road and then crossed in front of someone’s headlights during the fall. Word got out — instant legend! “The Ghost” then frustrated everyone who tried to kill him. We never saw him; he knew what we were going to do before we did. Conventional wisdom suggested that old bucks were super smart. We assumed they were out there in every woodlot sneaking around us; we just weren’t killing them — or even seeing them. We scouted for days. We hung great stands. We hunted long hours. But we never saw anything decent. It was natural to believe we just weren’t good enough. To…
In part one of this series, we covered how to choose the best peep sight aperture size for your applications. In part two, we covered peep sights that use lenses to improve the clarity of your sighting system. This month, we’ll discuss different types of peep sights and how each may help you shoot more accurately and consistently. The sheer number of options makes the decision of which peep to use difficult. We’ll go over all the popular styles, and I’ll give you my take on the pros and cons of each. After this discussion, you’ll hopefully be able to make a well-informed peep-buying decision. Long Peep Sights (Photos 1 and 2) These peeps, often referred to as “tunnel peeps,” typically have a large opening on each end, tapering to…
