Become an outdoors woman in 2018
Have you ever experienced driving through a snow shower in Maryland in the month of September?
If you think back to the fall weather we enjoyed in 2017, you probably won’t recall too many days where flip-flops would have been out of the question as an appropriate footwear option. But I’ll never forget driving to Garrett County this past September and passing over a mountaintop as a cloud unleashed a torrent of flurries on my windshield.
At that point, I became a little worried that I didn’t pack enough warm clothes for the weekend.
I like to joke that when you go to Deep Creek Lake in the summer for the first time ever, you’re going to be buying a sweatshirt after your first night. When the sun goes down, the temperature goes right down with it. I certainly expected some chilly mornings and cold nights, but I wasn’t expecting to see snow.
I’ve written about BOW, or Becoming an Outdoors Woman, a few times in this column, but I’d never been to one of the workshops myself. The topics sound right up my alley — backpacking, goose hunting, fishing for rockfish — but it’s hard for me to get away with four young kids at home.
But that all changed when an email from the Department of Natural Resources popped up in my inbox one day this past summer when my husband was away on a business trip.
This particular email advertised an upcoming clinic called Beyond BOW Wing-Shooting and Pheasant Hunt. It just so happened that the weekend of the workshop coincided perfectly with my 40th birthday. As I filled out the registration and wrote the check without even consulting my husband, I whistled Happy Birthday to myself.
So that’s how I found myself on a sunny afternoon on Sept. 8 driving through a snow shower and wondering if I should have packed some long underwear. When I arrived at the lodge around dusk, the driveway was already brimming with pick-up trucks, SUVs, sedans, and even a few of those small hybrids.
The women enjoying wine and hors-d’oeuvres inside the lodge were just as varied as the vehicles they drove. There were grandmothers and single ladies, stay-at-home moms and career women, representing cities from all over the state, including the three counties of Southern Maryland. Some were seasoned hunters, others had only minimal shooting experience. All were friendly and welcoming.
The next morning we assembled bright and early at the shooting range, Wings of Challenge, for a day of shooting trap and skeet. Some of the participants brought along their own shotguns, but the instructor, Ann Marie Foster,
had plenty of Beretta shotguns for anyone who needed to borrow one. Foster is owner of Calibered Events and hosts many shooting workshops across the country designed specifically with women in mind.
I had a chance to try out one of the Berettas, a fast and smooth shot that’s easy on the shoulder. They all came equipped with the stateof-the-art Kick-Off system, a hydraulic dampening mechanism that reduces recoil, a feature anyone who shoots clays for a couple hours is sure to appreciate.
I’ve got a lot of experience shooting trap, where the target flies out away from the shooter, but skeet is another story.
We started out with trapshooting, which I thought was gloriously fun and brought back a lot of memories of shooting in the back pasture with my dad when I was a kid. After lunch, we graduated to the more complex skeet range.
In skeet shooting, the shooter moves along different positions in a semi-circle while clay targets are released from two fixed locations called a high house and a low house, one on the left and one on the right. The target crosses from left to right or right to left in front of the shooter. Both trap and skeet are designed for bird hunters to hone their skills for hitting flying targets.
After practicing both kinds of clay shooting under the guidance of Foster and DNR staff, I was ready for the hunt the next morning.
The hunt was an optional add-on to the workshop, but most everyone stayed on for the third day and headed to Wild Wings Hunting Preserve in nearby Friendsville to chase pheasant and chukar. The hunt was undoubtedly most everyone’s favorite part of the weekend. We were divided into groups and divvied up the ammunition, then headed into the hills in teams to hunt birds over dogs.
The dogs were the real stars of the morning. I’ve seen plenty of retriever demonstrations in my lifetime, but I’ve never been bird hunting with the help of a pair of German Shorthair Pointers.
These dogs were natural pointers and retrievers and eager to follow the commands of their master. Even though there was frost on the ground when we got started, by the time we were finished that morning the dogs were taking dips in the water troughs to cool off from all the exertion of flushing birds out of the fields.
In my last column I urged readers to make spending more time outdoors with family and friends one of their New Year’s resolutions. Booking a charter fishing trip for 2018 is certainly one way to scratch that item off your list immediately. And I hope you do it. Registering for one of the many BOW workshops offered by DNR is another way to guarantee you’ll be spending some time in the field.
The BOW Goose Hunting Workshop in January is already filled, but DNR just announced a new workshop to be held in Dorchester County on Feb. 10.
“From Field to Table” is guaranteed to be a popular event. The first half of the workshop takes place outdoors where participants practice basic waterfowl identification, watch retriever demonstrations and learn proper cleaning of waterfowl. Then everyone heads to the kitchen to learn how to prepare and cook waterfowl under the guidance of a professional chef.
For more information and to register for the workshop, go to http:// dnr.maryland.gov/wildlife/Pages/Education/ bow.aspx. And make sure to sign up on the bottom left-hand side of the webpage for the mailing list to be the first to know about upcoming BOW events so you can become an outdoors woman in 2018.