Thursday, November 13, 2008
A quest to put the word "primitive" back into the muzzleloading season
Bill Cochran
Recent columns
If you’ve been hunting during Virginia’s two-week muzzleloading season, which opened Nov. 1, chances are you haven’t seen many sportsmen in buckskin outfits. Nor have you seen many powder horns, flintlocks or patched round balls.
Most people attracted to the season are there because it offers two additional weeks of deer hunting often during favorable weather with the rut coming on. Add to that, the woods are relatively free of other hunters and the deer are yet to be impacted by the rush of the regular firearm’s season.
The season is all about deer hunting with a firearm that has modernized the muzzleloader equation. To heck with tradition. Forget about added challenge. The only real drawback of a modern muzzleloader is its single-shot capacity. That’s no longer much of a handicap, considering the accuracy and deadliness of the first shot.
So what you see are hunters toting rifles with scopes that allow for accuracy out to 100 yards and beyond. These firearms have inline systems that are waterproof and foolproof; saboted bullets that are deadly; pre-measured black-powder substitutes -- even smokeless powder in some instances -- that promote consistency and are less likely to foul mechanisms.
Primitive? Handicapped? Demanding get-close hunting? Not really.
“The modern muzzleloader “is handicapped only by the slowness of his second shot,” said David Clark, of Danville, secretary-treasurer of the Virginia Muzzle Loading Rifle Association.
With that in mind, the association, composed of 10 chartered clubs, has asked the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries for a statewide deer season just for hunters using traditional guns. That means back to basics: no inline rifles, scopes, saboted bullets, Pyrodex pellets or 209 shotgun primers. You’d hunt with sidelock rifles, flintlock or percussion, loaded with a patched round ball or, in Civil War style muskets, a hollow-based minie ball. The guns wouldn’t be that much different from what Daniel Boone used, and for success you’d have to work at getting closer to your target and you’d have to pay more attention to your equipment.
The association wants the primitive season placed on the calendar prior to the current muzzleloading season and it wants several weeks in January.
Advocates say they would be willing to pay for the extra days through a special license.
Virginia’s current muzzleloading season began as a primitive hunting affair, but through the years modifications of equipment have been allowed, including the addition of scopes and the use of inline ignitions, saboted bullets, synthetic powder and — new this year — electronic ignition systems. In short, there has been a very strong trend away from tradition and toward modernization.
The request of the Virginia Muzzle Loading Rifle Association has been entered into the DGIF’s current regulation review process. It is certain to stimulate questions:
First, where are you going to find a place on the hunting calendar to add a new season without it competing with or bumping a current season? The period ahead of the present muzzleloading season holds the bow and crossbow season. Bowhunters aren’t likely to be happy with muzzleloading during what they consider their hunt time, no matter how primitive it might be. But that’s about the only place for it to go.
Secondly, why can’t primitive black-powder sportsmen be content to use their equipment during the current muzzleloading season? Now that the season covers most of the state and offers two prime hunting weeks in the fall and additional time in December and January, there appears to be plenty of room and more than enough deer for everyone. Much of the current muzzleloading hunting takes place on private property where landowners could designate primitive firearms-only if they choose.
It is unlikely that modern muzzleloaders will want to give up any of their season to the traditional hunters.
What we have is a case of their being plenty of deer for another season, but not enough weeks on the calendar to embrace it.
