As the number of hunters in Vermont declines, the sport’s veterans are working to educate a new generation to steward the land.
The air is still. In the predawn light, Heather Furman moves slowly. layered in a mix of technical outdoor gear and rugged camouflaged clothing, she walks through the cold hollows of her Jericho center land to the woods at neighboring Mobbs Farm.
In the silence, her slow breathing is barely audible. underneath her feet, the leaves are brittle with frost. She makes her way Camiseta Selección de fútbol de Alemania to her deer stand, which she installed at a place near a small creek, at the edge of an area where there has been a recent lumber harvest. She chose the location weeks prior by following informal paths and reading signs of deer—trees where the bark is scraped off, game trails. She climbs the ladder of the deer stand very slowly. With cold hands, she juggles rifle and pack. Then, seated, she waits. In the stillness, she listens while the trees creak and the forest begins to wake up. As a wood thrush launches into its two-toned, ethereal song, the dawn chorus starts.
After a long time, a deer appears, soundless. Furman’s heartbeat picks up and she breathes intentionally as she raises her rifle. Slowly, calmly, she takes goal through the sights of her gun, steadies it on a nearby branch and waits for a clean shot. After several long, cold, still minutes, the deer freezes. In the blink of an eye, it is gone.
Heather has been through this routine lots of times in the four years that she has been hunting. But, as she later tells me, that’s ok because “two weeks ago, after four years of deer hunting, I shot a pronghorn antelope on a trip to Wyoming.” Her patience paid off. “When I finally had the opportunity to be in that situation and actually pulled the trigger, I was calm in heart and mind and was able to make a highly accurate, instant kill.”
Furman, 48, is one of about 55,000 citizen Camiseta Schalke 04 hunters in the state of Vermont and she’s an anomaly. roughly one in four Vermont men hunt and for most, it’s a tradition passed down to them by their older male relatives. only one in ten Vermont women hunt. Furman is also unusual in that she started hunting as an adult.
Furman started hunting grouse at the age of 36, after her husband
Heather Furman spent four years preparing physically and mentally for her first kill. “The a lot of crucial thing for me was to be sure that the animal didn’t suffer,” Furman said. She is visualized here with the pronghorn antelope she shot in Wyoming this fall. photo courtesy Heather Furman
Dave, an upland bird hunter and former rock-climbing guide, gave her a shotgun for Valentine’s Day. After years of rock climbing together, he was intending to include her in a sport that he was rediscovering. Shotguns are the tool of choice for bird hunting, which Heather never really took to. four years ago, at 44, she made a decision to try deer hunting and, naturally, her spouse gotten her a rifle for her birthday.
Furman was born in Ohio and first moved to Vermont over 20 years ago to work as a park ranger at Maidstone state Park in the northeastern part of the state. She’s now the director of the Vermont chapter of the Nature Conservancy, which stewards 55 natural areas around the state. Fifty-four are open to hunting
Furman is a former ultra marathoner who has competed in a lot more than a dozen ultra races, including the Vermont 50, where she had a top ten finish in 2013.
She’s also a former rock climber who has climbed at the 5.11 grade and is the cofounder of the Climbing resource access group of Vermont, CRAG-VT. She served as the group’s first president for six years, from 1999 to 2005. Camiseta Selección de fútbol de Marruecos
Furman picked up deer hunting around the time when she retired from running ultra marathons. She had grown accustomed to spending long hours at a time in the woods as a trail runner and was compelled by the growing impact of deer on the landscapes she works with at the Nature Conservancy.
Hunting is an crucial tool for managing Vermont’s white-tailed deer populations, which, when overpopulated, can strip a forest of its undergrowth, leaving the deer malnourished and stopping native woodland plants from establishing themselves to regenerate the forest. This is increasingly common in parts of the state as the climate warms and deer populations are no longer kept in check naturally by predators and Vermont’s extreme winters.
As Furman says, she hunts because, “I like to do my part.”
She also finds hunting deeply rewarding. “I find that my awareness of what is around me and the diversity of experiences I have in the woods are so much greater than when I was trail running with the goal of covering ground and territory,” says Furman. “Now I’m content to spend a whole day exploring a quarter-mile of forest. I couldn’t say that five years ago when I was running back-to-back 25-mile training runs on my weekends.”
The decline of Hunting
Overall, hunting is on thenullnull