Squirrel hunting: Small game, big challenge

By Staff
Sept. 28, 2001
In a popularity contest, how should hunters rate a sport that offers a dozen or so stalking opportunities on a half day hunt, supreme testing of ones woodcraft skills, disciplined shooting, delicious meat in the game bag and that costs less than perhaps any other hunting sport? And oh yes, travel distance for most hunters is less than 20 miles and the season is over 4 months long!
These characteristics are just some of the attributes of squirrel hunting the forgotten sport of our times. Yes, we have left behind this grand tradition, watching it fade in the dust from the tires of our pickups and ATV's headed for the deer woods.
But ask a dozen mature hunters what sport aroused their hunting instinct and caused them to discover that they must hunt to fulfill some foreordained charge. Unless your survey is taken in the western half of the United States, 10 of the hunters will name squirrel hunting.
This is the sport for hunters of any age, and is ideal for beginners. Squirrel hunting is everything that hunting should be. Let's walk through a typical squirrel hunt.
You close the door of your pickup quietly, partly because nearby squirrels are waking up in the gray dawn light and partly because being quiet is the manifestation of the reverence you have for the autumn woods. By the time you step into the woods, your ears have turned up the volume, so that even the quiet shuffle of your footfalls rattles your eardrums and you wince at your noise-making.
First chance
Climbing down from his night bed in a high leaf nest, a bushytail skips along a limb and leaps into a nearby white oak tree. You are close because you moved in semi-darkness on damp leaves. You freeze in place, head upturned, gun at your side, muzzle down.
The squirrel climbs 40 feet and skitters out onto a limb, crawling the last few feet slowly as the limber limb sags with his weight. He settles into position amid a cluster of green acorns. Almost instinctively, you start to raise your rifle. Slowly, slowly you lift the .22, simultaneously guiding its stock to your shoulder.
Suddenly the squirrel's tail flips, like the cracking of a whip, and he turns in place and fairly flies to the tree's trunk and around it to the off side. He is gone. He saw you. "I was moving at a snail's pace," you complain to yourself. Next time you will move slower.
Further down the creek bottom you hear a limb make that swishing sound as a squirrel changes trees. Then you hear bits of acorn shell falling on the forest floor. You ease toward the sounds, wide eyed and feeling the ground with your toe before putting down your foot for each step. There he is! The gray squirrel has chosen a large limb on which to peel and eat an acorn. No leaves in the way. Lucky. One shot; one fat squirrel. One for two.
Welcome distractions
And so the morning continues, amid welcome distractions; golden rays of sunlight piercing through dark shadows and, in one spot, filtering through the precisely crafted web of a spider; a screaming flock of crows at their daily task of chasing an owl across the sky; the white flag of a deer as it jumps a log far out in a briar patch.
When you have made your circle and arrive back at your pickup, you are a couple short of a limit. Half the squirrels "out foxed" you, though you hunted with uncommon stealth. One finished breakfast and left the acorn tree just as you arrived after a 20 minute stalk. One heard you when a tiny stick cracked beneath your boot and you neither saw nor heard him again. Another offered a perfect shot as he paused head down on a dogwood trunk. But you didn't have your rifle up and in a flash he was gone.
A supreme test of stalking skill, this squirrel hunting. And every single stalk is different- squirrel after squirrel; day after day; year after year. No two stalks are exactly the same. And the failed ones teach us more than the successful ones. Too, unlike tracking a Cape buffalo in southern Africa, you get to pursue again and again – perhaps a dozen times – on the same day. Each separate stalk is a mini-hunt for a Kodiak Island brown bear; a Rocky Mountain elk; a bighorn ram in the far north; whatever you want it to be. For the hunter's prowess is no less tested in stalking gray squirrels in southern woodlands than pursuing any prized big game animal.
This week a new acquaintance said to me, "I am primarily a squirrel hunter." Right away I knew a lot about the man. I knew he appreciated a challenge and that he knew where to find plenty of challenges – in the squirrel woods. He was surely a highly skilled stalker.
Yes, there are still a few hunters, very few, dedicated to the preeminent sport of squirrel hunting. They understand what hunting really is. And they haven't forgotten where they learned.