So you want to bow hunt? You shoot regularly with your bow and are quite good at hitting targets, now you want to hunt with it. Hunting with a bow is a completely different sport than hunting with a gun. The hunter must master new skills and have even more patients to be a successful bow hunter.

One of the first things to do is find a place and carry your bow through the woods. It may sound silly but just carrying a bow through the woods is a skill in itself that needs to be learned before the hunt. Your bow will hang on everything in the woods. If you carry an arrow in the notch, it will stick in things and could easily stick into you. Many bow hunters have heard the new guy crashing about and cussing his bow on opening morning. Once you learn the art of navigating your bow through the woods, you will also hear noises the bow makes. It might rattle a bit with each step or hum with the wind; on a target range these noises would go completely unnoticed, but will drive you crazy on the hunt. Getting into woods is the best way to see how your bow is camouflaged. You will notice if something really sticks out.  A test walk in the woods will give a new hunter a chance to correct anything he does not like about the bow or other gear before the hunting season.

Bow hunting seasons typically open at least a month before the gun seasons do. This means the weather will be quite different than gun season. Bow season will almost always open in warmer weather. This means the hunting clothes need to be chosen with that in mind. You really do not want to get out there to hunt and sweat the whole time. It would mean you had that much more of a scent to scare away the animals.

Bow hunting is a difficult sport in the sense that if you do not have mastery of the required skills you will make no kill. The rewards from bow hunting are some times as intangible as the peace gotten from time spent in nature, but can be as rewarding as a nice thick venison steak for dinner. Each hunter has to find out what it is he or she values about bow hunting for themselves. The skills to be a successful bow hunter can take years to learn.