Becoming Outdoor Women

Adults often think that if they didn't hunt as a kid with their dad or their uncle, it's too late to learn now. Women especially seem shy about learning to hunt. They don't have a gun and they don't know what kind to buy or borrow. Their husband or boyfriend might not have the patience to teach them and there just aren't many women out there in the field.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, with the National Wild Turkey Federation and the Bureau of Land Management, recently put on a workshop just for women, Beyond Becoming an Outdoors Woman, designed to help them learn the basics about shotguns and bird hunting. A dozen women spent Saturday, Sept. 12, at the Trap Club west of Glasgow with experts, many of them women, who demonstrated a little of everything a person needs to know to get started or to improve.

The reasons they gave for signing up revealed a range of experience, from total novice to fairly experienced hunter.

"My husband wanted me to come." "At hunting camp I'm always cooking and I never get out to learn."

"I want to learn to shoot a moving target."

"I need more practice to get those fast birds."

Butch Tewell, a professional trainer of bird dogs, began the day with the Llewellin setters he raises at Brookhaven Kennels near Fort Peck. You can hunt birds without a dog, he said, but having one is so much more fun, and you don't lose many downed birds. His three adult dogs earned ooh's and ahh's from the onlookers when one pointed a bird and the others stiffened to attention, honoring the point. Snapping a bird wing on a fishing pole in front of a gangly 5-month-old puppy, he showed how he teaches the dog to hold that instinctive point.

Two female FWP employees, Joanne Stewart and Michael Nye, used some fairly travel-weary stuffed bird mounts to illustrate their talk on game bird species and where to find each one. FWP's public information officer, Ron Selden, laughed a little when the pheasant's tail fell off, and he described being new to bird hunting himself.

Many hunters don't know where they can go to hunt. BLM ranger Alexandra Burke used colored maps and hunting regulation pamphlets in her detailed presentation on access, describing public lands, block management and discovering the ownership of private land so one can ask for permission to hunt.

The afternoon was devoted to shooting, the thing that many had come for. Taking nothing for granted, FWP wardens Ron Howell and Todd Tryan demonstrated gun safety, from making sure the breech is empty to how to carry a gun in the field. Then the women lined up to fire at those elusive clay pigeons, with experienced hunters as coaches. Most were using 20-gauge automatic shotguns, although there were a couple of 12 gauges and a single-shot 20-gauge. FWP provided guns for those who didn't have one. Everyone got to use a whole box of shells and some progress was made. A couple of women began to make nearly every shot.

The housekeeping part of shooting was not neglected: cleaning the gun. Saying, "It's not really that hard," Chris Fortune of Hamilton, the National Wild Turkey Federation's regional director, moistened a cloth patch with gun oil, wrapped it around the wire brush at the end of the rod, and forced it down the barrel, wiping out the burned powder.

His best piece of advice was not to put a gun in a case and slide it under the bed for storage.

"Don't store a gun in a case. It'll rust," Fortune said.