Shooting Mistakes | Common Problems with Your Form

July 16, 2015/0 Comments/in 10RING / Powered by Stone Road Media

Common Shooting Mistakes with Your Bow

Archery is an art form as much as a skill. Anyone can draw a picture, but becoming the next Vincent van Gogh or Pablo Picasso is a significant challenge. Similarly, anyone can pick up a bow and shoot it with some accuracy. However, it takes years of careful practice to truly become a consistently good archer. If you can eliminate these common shooting mistakes, you’ll be well on your way to mastering your archery skills.

The first shooting mistake you might make starts with your stance. Let’s assume for this article that you’re a right-handed archer. You want your feet to be shoulder-width apart. Imagine an invisible line below you, with your left foot ahead of the line and your right foot behind the line. Both feet should slightly face toward your target, but be roughly parallel with each other. These tips should be enough to keep you balanced and establish a solid foundation for your shot.

Many archers have a tendency to grip their bow too tightly. When you place your bow hand on the side of the bow handle, you’re forced to completely circle your fingers around it to tightly maintain your grip. This also torques the bow at an angle, resulting in inaccurate and inconsistent arrow flight paths. Instead, let the bow naturally sit in the cradle between your thumb and index finger, and maintain a relaxed grip with loose fingers not fully encircling the handle. You’ll end up with more consistent groupings and also be more accurate.

The next shooting mistake most are guilty of is not having consistent anchor points. An anchor point is critical to staying consistent. Without one, your release hand can deviate from near your eye to down by your chin, and your arrows will be all over the board. To be effective, anchor points must be comfortable for the individual archer and easily repeatable. It needs to feel natural and be something that you could settle into in the dark. Some common anchor points include where your release hand contacts your jaw, or where the bowstring contacts your mouth or nose. Anchor points will vary based on what kind of bow you have, as the design and geometry is slightly different. All that matters is having reliable ones that work for you.

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Documenting Wildlife and Land Management Progress | The Importance of Keeping Records

Keeping Records of Property Work | Recording Your Wildlife and Land Management Activities

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When managing your land for wildlife, it is important to record what is happening on your property. There are many variations of wildlife and land management data collection, all of which will assist you in achieving your goals in the future. Many hunters are stubborn when it comes to keeping track of activities on the property. They focus on hunting and what needs to be done in order to improve their hunting, but they are missing out on a lot of information when they don’t document their wildlife and land management progress and success.

Typically, hunters keep two types of wildlife and land management records. The first are harvest records. This information can be kept in a small spiral binder so it can easily tucked it into a hunting pack and make observations after a hunt takes place or before dressing out a harvested animal. It’s important to always record the weight of a deer and the score of the antlers if it’s a buck. For turkeys, record the length of a gobbler’s beard, spurs, and the weight. The approximate time of the shot, and the location of the hunt are also documented. You can also expand the wildlife and land management data collected such as the moon phase, barometric pressure, and other weather conditions present at the time of the hunt. When dealing with turkeys, you can also record what calls worked best during the hunt, the roost sites, and even examine the recently consumed foods in a turkey’s crop, which tells what food sources have been on the menu recently.

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Bowhunting Ethics and Sportsmanship | Make Every Shot Count

July 10, 2015/0 Comments/ Powered by Stone Road Media

Ethical Harvests and Hunting | Killing Quickly and Effectively

As hunters, we face a whole new set of challenges than thirty years ago. Government regulation, anti-hunting groups, and diversity amongst our fellow hunter seem to have brought a spotlight onto our sport of which many of us are not accustomed. It seems the sanctity and purity of our sport gets distorted more every day by the perceptions encouraged by the media and tales of perverted sportsmanship displayed by poachers across the nation. For some of us, bowhunting ethics and sportsmanship still exist. In fact, they are the very core of our sport and dictate every shot taken afield. Ethical harvests and hunting, making every shot count, and killing quickly and effectively are still the most important aspect of the hunt for us, and if you’ve read this far, we must not be the only ones.

The best way we can exhibit bowhunting ethics and sportsmanship is by being as deadly as possible. Every bowhunter has made a bad shot or misjudged the range of their target at some point or another, and those who haven’t surely will. There is an indescribable ache in your gut that comes with knowing you have caused that animal undue suffering. This is nothing to be ashamed of. This feeling comes from a great respect for the game we chase and a desire to harvest it cleanly and ethically. This is bowhunting.

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Best Arrow Rest | Drop-Away vs. Containment Arrow Rests

July 9, 2015/0 Comments/in 10RING /by Stone Road

Best Arrow Rest for Hunters| Drop-Away orContainment Rests

The arrow rest type battle is as ancient as the fixed vs. mechanical broadheads. For this battle the two competitors going head to head are the containment rest and drop-away rest. The one you install on your bow might eventually come down to your opinion, but you need to know the advantages and disadvantages. What is the Best Arrow Rest? You decide…

The Containment Rest

At least from the beginning bowhunter and archer stand point the full containment rest is hands-down the best arrow rest. This bow rest will guarantee the arrow will be there when you go to draw. They do this by fully containing the arrow like the 3 points of contact on the Halo rest. This contact makes it one of the most popular types of bow rests among bow hunters. The contact can also result in poorly placed shots. Why?

Shooting form is critical when shooting with full containment rest. Longer contact with the arrow from shaft to fletching means that any sort of movement or hiccup in your form will deal repercussions on your shot. To eliminate this contact the drop-away rest was introduced.

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