Deer Cam's and the Spirit of the Hunt

Apparently, the antics of Paris, Lindsey and Britney are not enough, these days even wildlife is posing for cameras. Those of you who prudently stick to urban areas during deer hunting season may not be familiar with the hottest trend in high tech hunting; the Deer-Cam. The device is nothing less than a fully automated remote paparazzi system that hunters position on busy woodland trails to photograph narcissistic deer.

The object of these systems is simple and straight-forward -- to identify celebrity deer and cull them from the herd.

If only such systems could be adapted for.... (best not go there).

Anyway, some outdoor enthusiasts are resisting the idea. These disgruntled purists are rallying against this latest trend in the age-old practice of killing and eating wild things. They say it is not sporting. Not sporting? Exactly when in human history did hunting become something people did for aesthetic pleasure?

I find this very confusing. Imagine what our ancestors would give to have something as nifty as a deer-cam. Just look at what the Lakota and Ojibwa gave up to have iron-tipped arrows. These people knew what hunting was all about. Getting bush-meat. And logically anything to make the task more efficient is, sad to say, in the truest spirit of the hunt.

I argued about high tech hunting years ago with my Dad.

The man was a devoted husband and father, yet every autumn weekend he hid from his wife and children on the river flats near Winona. For him, hunting was a ritual that began in the dark.  He would wake at 4AM to drive 60 miles downriver to launch his boat before the first thin line of blue appeared on the eastern horizon.

Most often the backwater lakes were frozen, so he broke ice in the dark with a plywood boat toward a little bay in the bulrushes where he could spread his decoys. There, after setting up, he would retire to warm his hands around a hot cup of coffee, and sit in the cold, looking out on the splendor of a waking misty world. The shooting began at sunrise, but in between settling in and shooting was the moment he loved the best, a half-hour of absolute peace under a blue sky colored by a rising sun.

This to him was a bliss; a bliss he tried to impart to his sons. And we loved it as much as he. For a while... until we left home to join outcast bands of young unattached males.

Of course we still went hunting – waking late after sleeping off a hang-over. On those weekend mornings, we would stumble into an old station wagon, the sun high in the sky, and cruise, radio blaring, down to the bluffs above the river bottoms. Where we would lounge on the hood, with the valley spread wide before us, examining a topographical map and scanning the horizon with binoculars. Our strategy was simplicity itself, to monitor the flight of ducks scurrying and back and forth across the bottoms, chased up by old guys like my dad, and trace their routes to the isolated pot holes hidden away in fields and woods --- hidden away from everyone but those who had the latest USGS map.

Typically after a strenuous 10 minutes of work, we would hop back into the car, following the line of the map down dusty back roads until we found a spot to pull over and crawl across the fields with our shotguns to jump unsuspecting ducks.

It took less than an hour.

On the way home, we always stopped by my parents place to pluck feathers and drink beer. Long after sunset, my dad would trail in with nothing in his game bag to find us watching drinking his beer and watching his TV with our brace of fat ducks, and occasional goose, chilling in his freezer.

I tried to explain our method, but he got red-faced “That’s not hunting”, he would yell, “That’s harvesting!!”

“Uh-huh”, it was. That was the point.

It seemed kind of silly to me. If the spirit of hunting was to find wonder in an early morning on the slough, why not bring a camera instead of a gun?

Eventually, my dad saw things my way. I then followed his lead. Like my dad in his later years, I enjoy mornings on the slough. I savor the conversation of waterfowl, the scent of dry grass, the crunch of leaves, and colors of autumn.

I just don't carry a gun.