Not a PA article, still a good read

http://www.newhampshire.com/article....articleid=2399

More women find hunting a way to keep the table full

A 12-year-old going out squirrel hunting with her father. A mother with two young sons and a long winter in front of her, getting her deer for the meals it will provide.

These are just a couple of the North Country women who have carried on the tradition of hunting. For those who grew up hunting, the goal was to bring something home for the supper table. The 12-year-old who grew up hunting for the dinner table is a grandmother now and hasn’t hunted since she was pregnant with her first child, but she remembers fondly the tenderness of the deer meat her mother used to can.

“We shot it, we ate it,” she says simply. Her mother used to stew the rabbits she would bring home after hunting with her father and older brothers. In the upper reaches of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, she and her family hunted regularly, she says, “many times out of necessity.”

Still, she enjoyed the time spent outdoors with her father. When she was in high school, her family moved to Berlin and she met a young man who appreciated her love of the outdoors and the fact that she hunted.

“That’s one of the things we had in common when we first started dating. He was intrigued,” she says of the man who is now her husband. Her last time out hunting was when she was seven months pregnant.

“Things change,” she says, “when you have children.”

Things changed for Martha VanderWolk, a New Hampshire native who went to college in Vermont and stayed in that state, raising three boys and taking up hunting to help feed the family, but they changed in the opposite direction.

“My first husband,” she explains, “was a ‘real Vermonter,’ so I pretty much had to learn to hunt. The first time he took me out to shoot a gun, he put 25 percent too much black powder in the muzzle loader, on purpose, and it just about took my shoulder off.”

Not every woman who would like to take to the woods come hunting season is lucky enough to have a male friend or relative, (or a female friend or relative), waiting in the wings to teach her how to handle firearms and how to hunt. Fortunately, with the number of hunters declining over the past few decades, there’s a big push to make the sport more inclusive. That push will likely get stronger, as fish and game organizations take advantage of the publicity generated by moose-hunting Republican vice-presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

This past June the Androscoggin Valley Fish and Game Club sponsored a Women’s Firearms Familiarization Program, teaching the half-dozen women participants how to safely handle and shoot a wide range of firearms. The instructors, all directors or members of the club, patiently gave the women one-on-one instruction when the six took aim at the targets. Far from trying to keep the art of shooting a male domain, the men seemed thrilled to be passing on their skills and knowledge to the women.

New Hampshire has more than 40 fish and game clubs and shooting ranges, giving everyone the opportunity to learn the most basic skill, shooting, before taking to the woods in search of game. That list is accessible at wildlife.state.nh.us/Links/fish_and_game_clubs.htm.

Also necessary before taking to the woods is a hunting license, and to obtain a hunting license it’s necessary to take the hunting education course, the schedule for which is available on the state’s Fish and Game Department Web site at wildlife.state.nh.us/.

Women can also take one of the seasonal Becoming an Outdoors-Woman sessions. Co-sponsored by the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department and the N.H. Wildlife Federation, the fall session recently covered firearms use, along with archery and fly-fishing. The upcoming winter session includes ice fishing, winter survival skills and “shoe and shoot.” For more information, go to wildlife.state.nh.us/Outdoor_Recreation/bow.htm#Fall.