Petersen's Bowhunting August 2023

This is putting increased pressure on game populations that call public lands home and shining a bright spotlight on the need to alleviate that pressure by creating access to many public-land acres currently out of reach. At some point in your life, you’ve surely been asked the age-old riddle, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it really make a sound?” While that's an interesting debate, I’d like to offer a modified version that goes like this: “If the public owns a piece of land, but no members of the public can access it, is it really public?” That is the question many sportsmen — from rank-and-file bowhunters to leaders of national sportsmen’s groups — have been asking recently as they…

WHITETAILS Changing Food Plot Practices Benefit Deer and Hunters When developing food-plot blends for clients, I remind them deer can’t go to the pharmacy for medications and vaccines. Rather, they have the instinctual ability to seek plants that offer medicinally beneficial compounds. If those plants are not present, whitetails suffer — and so does your bowhunting. Modern food-plotting practices, moving in lockstep with modern agriculture, rely heavily on toxic, man-made chemicals, resulting in extensive damage to ecosystems and whitetail health. If things continue on this trajectory, I fear our whitetail population is on a crash course with an overwhelming number of chronic diseases. Chasing Our Tails The commercial agriculture industry is hyper-focused on maximizing “yield,” the amount of a crop that can be harvested on a per-acre basis. And most…

BOWHUNTING WISDOM Invest Now for Huge Dividends Later! August is a great time for this, and my goal with this column is to find a few things you can buy right now that will make a difference in your accuracy this fall. With $400 in my billfold, I am going to set out to buy better shooting. Back-Tension Release Aid Learning to make a surprise release is the very best way to beat target panic, making aiming a pleasure and accuracy a foregone conclusion. After a summer spent practicing with a back-tension release (they have no trigger and fire through a turning motion of your hand), you will reprogram your central nervous system, making you much better able to make a surprise shot when you go back to squeezing the…

BETTER BOWHUNTING Important Considerations for Precision Operation and Accuracy I will now give you some practical advice on the selection and use of your rangefinder in order to be the most accurate bowhunter you can be. Collimation Is Important The general assumption is that a rangefinder is a rangefinder and they are all created equal; however, that is far from the reality. Each rangefinder has its own unique personality, flaws and limitations, and spending a lot of money on a rangefinder does not guarantee you will end up with a quality instrument. The most expensive rangefinder I ever purchased was not accurate. To test it, I put out a tennis ball held up by an extremely thin, stiff wire mounted on a tripod, and I mounted said rangefinder on a…

CROSSBOWS Keep These Tips in Mind for a Successful Stalk We parked on the highest hill and started breaking down the landscape with good optics. We could see for miles, and it didn’t take long to find several groups of elk. A spotting scope was used to look over the bulls and devise a plan for getting closer. The goal was to find a target bull, stalk closer and wait until the elk bedded to move in tight. Western game species know how to use the lay of the land, and thinking like an elk or deer helps to put you in their bedroom when they least expect it. The bulls fed across a grassy face and started working their way into a coulee. The sun often dictates what the…

Are brighter sight pins always better? Sight manufacturers incorporated them into their pins, and all of a sudden there was an explosion of bright and colorful pins. The pins were easier to see (especially in low light) and allowed shooters to get on target more quickly while aiming. Many newer archers probably haven’t ever seen a sight without fiber-optic pins. Sights used to have metal/plastic pins, and the tips of the pins were painted with different colors — sometimes making them hard to differentiate through a dark peep sight. Nowadays, every sight has bright, glowing pins. When we started using fiber-optic sights, we thought, The brighter, the better! We soon discovered that wasn’t necessarily the case. When we first headed out to the archery range, the glowing pins seemed awesome,…