How, when, why did you start hunting?

Fisheadgib

The thread about taking someone on their first hunt got me thinking that most of us have a story about how we got started hunting and another thread about shooting more than our parents uncovered that many here didn't have parents that hunted and passed it down. So how did y'all get started in the hobby?
My parents emigrated to Wisconsin from Hungary in early 1958 with a desire to become Americans. They and all of their friends made every effort adopt American culture and hobbies and took up hunting, camping, fishing, picnicking at the lake, grilling in the yard, and anything they could think of that other people in Wisconsin did. They maintained a connection with their own culture but becoming American came first. Wisconsin has a short deer season but people put a lot of effort and money into that one week and my dad and many of his friends took up deer hunting. Dad started taking my brother and I when we were 10 but we couldn't hunt until we were 12 and I got my first deer with a 12ga single shot Springfield and I was hooked. My brother went a few times but never took it up and I'm not sure if he's ever harvested a deer to this day.

early

My Dad went with his friends every November. As I grew older I pestered him about wanting to go. He said if I met certain requirements like doing well in school and taking on chores at home he'd take me to the hunter safety class and take me hunting. Deer hunting were a long weekend. And I hunted squirrels in the fall when he was bow hunting as I lost interest in bow hunting after trying it. The anual adventures literally took on an air that rivaled Christmas time.

JerryBobCo

When I was six or seven, I tied my pocket knife to the end of a stick to make a spear. I talked my dad into taking out to some pasture in hopes of slaying something. I probably thought I'd make a skilled throw and get a rabbit, instead all I managed was cutting the tail off of a lizard.

NCFUBAR

My Grandpa started me squirrel hunting with a .22 when I was 6 years old. Back then it was no season or limits enforced in our area by Mr Green Jeans ... it was protect the pecan trees and Brunswick Stew!

tubabucknut

I started in shooting for self defense and just shooting for fun. I had virtually no interest in hunting. When you go to matches, classes, or just to the range you meet a lot of people that hunt. It is a contagious disease, and I caught it. The only treatment is buying more guns, gear, and shooting live animals. The only drawback to the treatment is that it makes the disease worse. It is a viscous cycle.

jaywapti

No one in my family before me ever hunted or owned any guns, when i was 6 or 7 my aunt married a "swamp rat " he owned a company called Reptile leather Co. He recognized my interest in the woods and wildlife and taught me to shoot and took me snake, hog and **** hunting, in late 1950 he took me deer hunting and i got my first buck, i was 13, I also got my first turkey that year, the rest is history.

JAY

bisley

My dad let me shoot blue jays and blacbirds with my Daisy pump. I got an H&R Topper Jr. with the first $30 I earned, at about age 10, and tried to keep Mama busy frying cottontails. It progressed from there, with squirrels and ducks, and finally many lean years of whitetail hunting at odd times.

JRL

About 1965, middle of winter on uncle's farm just outside a small town in Northern Illinois... dad, uncle and older cousins would take me hunting.

I still remember my first rabbit. Shot him with my Dad's 1961 featherweight Winchester Model 12 (choke=improved cylinder) 12 ga. as he was scampering away. (Good thing I only got him with one or two of the shot pellets)

Learned how to step on rabbits head while holding feet to pull head off and let it bleed out before putting in my vest

I still have that model 12 and shoot trap with it. I have the original receipt showing my dad paid $81 for the gun, new, from the hardware store

woodsrunner

If you grew up in the Deep South, especially the Southern Mountains, you started hunting about the time you started learning to talk! Honestly....some of the very earliest childhood memories that I have are of unscrewing the big hand screw on the side of my Grandpa's little Winchester 06 to take it apart....I still have the little 06!

R51MAN

I started hunting when I was 12 years old. I am now 82. Back in the day, we rode our bicycles down the roads to the woods and it was okay. No soccer moms to
panic over the word GUN! We kept our shotguns in our trunk or behind the truck seat and went dove hunting after school. My shop instructor had an
old Remington rolling block .32 rimfire hanging behind his desk. On a plaque. I later bought it and converted it to center fire .32.
Blackie

Farm Boy Deuce

I was 8 the first time I bothered Dad enough to take me dove hunting. That is when I learned what a ground swat was, no chance of loosing them in the grass. It has grown every year since then.

All the men who mentored me in one area or another hunted. All my friends hunted. Not hunting was viewed with suspicion. Really my love of guns and shooting grew out of hunting, at one time my Grandfather was the gun guy in my family. Now I have taken the mantle, just as it is mine and my brothers job to pass on hunting as a skill and time of bonding among family.

Farm Boy Deuce

Huh, that is the first time I have had my phone double post on me.

snake284

I grew into it or rather was born into it. Daddy grew up shooting rabbits and squirrels in North East Texas. Then he hunted ducks when he got older. Deer hunting was not a big deal there then because there were very few deer in the area at that time. When I was 7 years old we moved from Texas City, to Seadrft, here in Calhoun County, and it wasn't long before my dad was hunting ducks again. That was 1955. Then I remember about 1957 when I was 9, my dad was with a couple of guys that killed a doe on a ranch just East of town. They had permission from the ranch owner. This hooked my dad. Then in 1959 we were in Austin for Christmas and my aunt's husband took us to LLano Texas deer hunting. Daddy killed a 5 point and then we were both hopelessly hooked.

Jayhawker

Upland bird hunting was a family thing...just something we did. At some point Dad gave me a .22 rifle and a box of ammo and told me that I could get a quarter apiece for jack rabbits down at the Co Op....2 rabbits paid for a box of .22 LR and the rest was pure profit...who needs an allowance with that kind of stuff going on?

HAWKEN

I went with my dad, when I was big enough to keep up. I got to play "dog" by kicking old farm machinery and jumping on brush piles to make the rabbits run. When I was 10, I got my own gun, a single shot .22lr, but I couldn't take it out by my self until I was 14. We was poor folks and if it wasn't for wild game, we probably wouldn't have meat on the table. When I was 15, I got an Iver-Johnson 20ga shotgun, for Christmas. robin

snake284

R51MAN wrote: »

I started hunting when I was 12 years old. I am now 82. Back in the day, we rode our bicycles down the roads to the woods and it was okay. No soccer moms to
panic over the word GUN! We kept our shotguns in our trunk or behind the truck seat and went dove hunting after school. My shop instructor had an
old Remington rolling block .32 rimfire hanging behind his desk. On a plaque. I later bought it and converted it to center fire .32.
Blackie

Hey, those were the good ol' days. I remember in the 50s and 60s kids driving to school in a pickup with a gun rack in the back window with a .30-30 or something in it. No stupid panic, it's what we did. It was our lifestyle and nobody got killed. You bad mouthed the second amendment you got your ass whupped!!!

NN

When I was 11 some neighbor men took me hunting, why I do not know except they were real good men.

One exposed me to duck hunting and the other to group pheasant hunting. We moved, but, I caught the bug that went dormant until I was 14.

Then another Cadet at SJMA talked my mother to take us hunting so an adult was present. We shot a bunch of rabbits.

At the next year, I had the bug bad and went whenever I could, I'd get dropped off somewhere to hunt and walk home or had a time to be present for pick up.

Actually, except for the few exposures to hunting listed, I taught myself to hunt.

Fast forward, 63 years and I am slowing down. I enjoy it as much, just do not go much.

jbp-ohio

Older brothers hunted.

I mostly started on my own with my pellet gun. Toads, frogs, bumble bees, hornets, tomato worms, cicadas, grasshoppers, birds, rats in the barn.............. if it moved, I shot it.

Linefinder

I can't remember the first fish I caught, or my first shot from a firearm. I guess I was born with a fishing rod in one hand and a rifle in the other.

I do remember the first time I shot a 12 gauge, though. I was in kindergarten, and it's a damn good thing Dad was holding on to me.

Mike

woodsrunner

Dang, Jay! We'uns ain't the oldest anymore! R51MAN got us beat 3-4 years!

Zee

I started squirrel hunting around 6 years old. At least, about as far back as my memory goes of my early childhood.

NN

R51MAN wrote: »

I started hunting when I was 12 years old. I am now 82. Back in the day, we rode our bicycles down the roads to the woods and it was okay. No soccer moms to
panic over the word GUN! We kept our shotguns in our trunk or behind the truck seat and went dove hunting after school. My shop instructor had an
old Remington rolling block .32 rimfire hanging behind his desk. On a plaque. I later bought it and converted it to center fire .32.
Blackie

Welcome aboard

Six-Gun

As a kid whose parents never allowed me to hunt, I felt like I had to make up for lost time as an adult. Shortly after finishing Air Force navigator school, I took hunter safety at my first duty station at Offutt AFB in Nebraska. I then asked a friend there who deer hunted to show me the ropes and started learning the craft. I had very little success with big game until another friend took me on a deep dive into deer patterns and behavior. Then it started to click.

gator

Started out hunting in my grandma's garden with a BB gun.
She would give me a penny for every grasshopper and a dime for each sparrow.
By the end of the week I'd make enough money to pay for more BBs and some candy.
Must have been 10 or 11 the first time I was allowed to hunt rabbits with a 20 guage.

Sent from my SM-T530NU using Tapatalk

jaywapti

woodsrunner wrote: »

Dang, Jay! We'uns ain't the oldest anymore! R51MAN got us beat 3-4 years!

Ya know how that makes me feel ??? Like a kid again, all hail to R51MAN :win:

JAY

snake284

jaywapti wrote: »

Ya know how that makes me feel ??? Like a kid again, all hail to R51MAN :win:

JAY

Why you ol' goats!!!

:rotflmao::rotflmao::rotflmao::rotflmao::rotflmao::rotflmao::rotflmao:

CHIRO1989

I can't remember when I got my Red Rider, 3rd or 4th grade, got a bolt .22 and a pump 20 gauge soon after, as soon as us kids could keep up on a deer drive, they took us hunting, 3rd or 4th grade, only missed 2 because of grad school.

orchidman

Started when I was 6 or 7 walking behind my dad as he hunted Upland game with an English setter. Every time he dropped the fired 12g shells on the ground I would pick them up and walk behind him sniffing the smell of freshly burnt powder. When he started chasing ducks I was his 'retriever'..... Even now, the smell of a freshly fired shotgun shell brings back a flood of memories.

Got my 12g just after I turned 11.

Didnt start hunting deer etc until I was in my late 20's. Didnt have much success at first but concentrated mainly on stalking up close to those animals I did see. Up until about 10 yrs ago, the longest shot I had taken on a deer was 116yds. Am slowly stretching the distances as I get older.

bisley

orchidman wrote: »

Even now, the smell of a freshly fired shotgun shell brings back a flood of memories.

So true, and beyond that, is probably one reason I was such a fool for going to the drag races. 'Double A fuelers' in the sixties burned a nitro mixture that smelled exactly the same and the smell drifted over the crowd on the sidelines as they went by.

Fisheadgib

Linefinder wrote: »

I can't remember the first fish I caught, or my first shot from a firearm. I guess I was born with a fishing rod in one hand and a rifle in the other.

I do remember the first time I shot a 12 gauge, though. I was in kindergarten, and it's a damn good thing Dad was holding on to me.

Mike

I'm fairly sure that my first fish would have been a carp or sucker from the Rock River in Wisconsin. My folks loved fish and you could catch a barrel full of them any time you wanted from that river. Anything we caught was considered food, even carp and suckers, and this was all on canepoles.
The first real gun I fired was also a 12ga. Dad used to take us duck hunting with him and when he was done hunting, he would run the boat into flocks of coots on the water while my brother and I were feverishly pumping and shooting our Daisy BB guns thinking we could knock one down. One day dad asked if I wanted to shoot his shotgun (a Sears Ted Williams mod 12) and of course I said YES! I stood up in the boat and rested the barrel on the edge of the blind and pulled the trigger. Next thing I know, I'm laying in the bottom of the boat and my dad and his friend are laughing their butts off. My brother declined the offer to shoot it after that.

bullsi1911

I was a gun nut first, and when I was about 13 or 14 my shooting buddy invited me to go on a hunt with him and his family. All I owned at that point were .22s, so I borrowed a Savage 99 in .243, they stuck me in a blind, and after the sun came up, I shot a 2 year old Doe. The whole story is much longer, but those are the basics.

Most importantly, that friend that took me hunting is still my best friend, someone I still hunt with, the godfather to my son, and his family is closer to me than some of my own family. I have now spread the love of hunting to my own brothers, my son and wife, and now to some of my friends.

If you get a chance, take a newbie hunting. It echoes out further than you know.