Better equipment, clothing, instruction has helped put more North Carolina women afield.
It’s been impossible to miss that over the past handful of years, more and more photographs of smiling women kneeling behind dead deer, ducks and turkeys have been showing up in the incoming e-mail files at North Carolina Sportsman.
The women are of all ages, from schoolgirls to gray-haired matrons. They’re holding rifles, shotguns, compound bows and crossbows. They’re in camouflage and blaze orange and they’re all smiling.
You’d have to be blind not to understand that a trend appears to be developing — more women are becoming interested in hunting and are heading to North Carolina’s woods and fields every fall. And they’re just as proud of the 8-point bucks they’re killing as their husbands, brothers and sons.
According to the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, women bought around 22,000 of the quarter-million hunting licenses sold in 2013, an increase of almost 100 percent since the 2006-2007 season and almost 10 percent of the total license sales. That didn’t surprise anyone at the magazine, because females made up around 15 percent of the entries to the 2013-14 Bag-A-Buck contest.
Are we getting the right picture of things? Apparently so, according to a number of outlets. So, what’s happened? The appearance of more women on hunting and outdoors TV shows had an effect, telling women that camouflage clothing and deer tags really were okay. Then, Katniss Everdeen and her buddies on the Hunger Games movie apparently made it cool for a girl to carry archery equipment. Women began piling into archery stores and gun shops across North Carolina, and, in a lot of cases, accompanying their husbands and/or boyfriends into the woods.
“There has really been an increase” in the number of women who visit Shannon Lyndon’s Riverview Sports Shop on US 16 just north of the Catawba River. “I’m selling a lot more compound bows and crossbows to women, and a lot more rifles,” Lyndon said. “It started about two or three years ago. I think the Hunger Games made a lot of difference; we sold a lot of recurve bows after that.
“And it helped to have a lot more women on TV shows. It used to be all men, and then you had some shows with men and women, and now you have all-women shows,” he said. “That definitely made an impact. Women were saying, ‘I want to do this, too.’”
Lyndon, who has a booth at the Dixie Deer Classic in Raleigh in March, said all you have to do is look across the building at the booth where Lee and Tiffany Lakoski of TV’s “The Crush” hang out.
“More women go to see them at the Dixie Deer Classic than men,” he said.
Katrina Arpin of Pfafftown, a Forsyth County community, has hunted about half of her 30 years, beginning as a self-described “tomboy” in her teens in northern Minnesota, hanging around with guy friends who hunted many days after school. She moved to North Carolina 7 years ago for a job in the banking industry, and 2 years ago, she began working for Tachtacam, a company that makes cameras for hunters to carry into the woods. She began filming her own hunts 2 years ago, and last year, she joined the Widowmakers, a TV hunting show that airs on Channel 266 on the Dish Network on Thursdays at 8:30 p.m.
While she’s a life-long hunter, Arpin understands perfectly the recent upsurge in women’s interest in hunting.
“I think the biggest thing, really, is there are now some women on TV, and girls can see that they can do it,” he said. “And I think there are more programs out there to help women. Men used to try and teach their wives or girlfriends how to shoot a bow, but they didn’t have the right equipment. There were no lightweight bows for ladies, and it was hard to teach them to pull back a 60-pound bow.”
B.B. Gillen is an “outdoor skills coordinator” for the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission who runs the agency’s “Becoming an Outdoor Woman” program and sets up women-only hunter-education classes. It’s largely her programs that Arpin was talking about.
“We have seen a bit increase in the amount of women who are interested in the hunting sessions we hold, more so in the past 2 years than before,” she said. “This year, when we held a hunting class, the seats were all filled up. We’ve held three women’s only hunting ed classes this year, and they’ve filled up. And even the youth hunts we put on, I’d say over the last 5 years we’ve seen a big increase in the number of girls ages 12 to 15 who sign up four our hunts. More and more girls are applying for them.”
Gillen said Hunger Games had a big effect on more women taking up shooting, and then hunting, and the Commission ending restrictions on the use of crossbows has ramped things up. But another factor has been the desire of women to spend more time with boyfriends or husbands who are spending plenty of time afield.
“I have heard comments from women who want to go out hunting with their significant others — ‘I want to do what he’s doing’,” Gillen said. “But just as often, you’ll hear about two women who met at a BOW event or an all-women hunter-education class and began hunting partners.
“I’ve read somewhere that the increase in the number of women hunters, nationwide, is about 11 percent (annually),” she said. “One thing I know is, if you can ever get a woman to start shooting, she’ll be hooked — hook, line and sinker.”
Lyndon believes one reason women keep hunting once they’re introduced is they learn things the correct way — they’re an empty canvas waiting for the right paint.
“They’re so much easier to teach,” he said. “Good ol’ boys can be hard-headed; they think they know it all. I can take a girl downstairs (to his store’s range) and have her shooting a bow in no time.”
Rhonda Snyder obviously learned all her lessons quickly. The Efland woman admitted that she started hunting to spend more time with her husband. She got serious a few years ago when, with kids old enough to attend high school, she had a little more free time to get into the woods.
Armed with a crossbow, Snyder put down 245 inches of horns in 6 minutes on Sept. 16, 2011, when she killed a big 8-point buck with a drop tine, then killed a big 7-point buck. Then, last Sept. 15, she dropped an 16-point Orange County buck — a main-frame 5×6 with five sticker points, that green scored at 141 3/8 inches.
Christin Carter, a student in East Carolina University’s dental school, got her deer-hunting lessons from her boyfriend, Brad Whitman, then she went out and killed a huge buck on her family’s farm in the Guilford County town of Oak Ridge last season.
The opening day of gun season last fall, Carter killed a 12-point buck that measured around 155 inches.
“My first deer is bigger than any deer he’s ever seen,” said Carter, who started going hunting with Whitman in Duplin County in October. A month later, she was kneeling behind a 165-pound buck killed at 200 yards with a single shot from a .270.
“They’re taking us and getting us started and we’re going out on our own,” she said.
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