Learning the Outdoors: How do you teach instinct?

Learning to Hunt

At some point in our hunting career, we were all the new guy, or the kid tagging along. If your experience as a child was anything like mine, you probably remember looking at a seemingly barren hillside. While your seniors pointed out and identified one animal after another. Learning the outdoors can be a challenge, a combination of using your brain and instinct together.

my brother and I, we only shoot with **suppressors** now

Or perhaps you spent hours sitting in a blind wondering why everyone else was dropping ducks but you, or watching a bobber float motionless for hours. Learning to hunt, or the art of being a successful hunter and outdoorsman can be hard without someone showing you the way. But how do you teach someone something you’re not even sure how you learned it yourself?

Some Things are Taught

You can read books, and blogs like this one. You can watch others, but nothing beats hands-on experience and being shown the ropes by someone who has done it. Whether it be building a fire, calling a bull elk in, or identifying a good fishing hole.

from an elk hunt long passed, my son didn’t know I had a reed in my mouth when calling. He thought I was just making the sounds with my mouth. He began copying the sounds using only his squeaky little voice, and ended up talking with quite a few bulls over a weeks time.

It all looks the same to a novice, until the finer details that matter are pointed out by a trusted instructor. As our society moves faster and faster towards the black hole future that seems to await us, we would do well to distill as much knowledge as possible from our elders who know this world far better than ourselves.

You can teach someone to find the little eddies behind rocks in a river where fish hide. You can teach someone how to pattern deer, and follow their movements to devise a hunting strategy. But you can’t teach someone how to focus their eyes to spot the subtle appearance of a hidden deer’s ears bedded in heavy brush. That is something they have to pick out and see for themselves, and once they do it can be repeated until it becomes second nature.

My brothers and I have learned a lot together

Some Things are Learned

It’s those challenging things like learning to recognize a hidden animal, dope the wind on a shot, or just when to set a hook that require experience to get good at. These things typically take time to perfect.

Once you’ve gotten your feet wet or your hands bloody, there is a bit more of an understanding. You’ve earned just enough knowledge to be dangerous, and perhaps you get lost in a dark forest. Or get knocked off a reef by a rogue wave in my case. It’s only then that you learn to depend on your own experience to develop plans that eventually become success.

Mentoring new outdoorsmen doesn’t always mean children, but make sure many of them are. Read more about that subject here.

My kids and I in the South Pacific, we smashed the Corvina with that old **Abu Garcia**

Over time these experiences are what make us seasoned outdoorsmen. When you stack up everything you’ve learned and been taught you might start to think you’re pretty hot stuff.

Realization

At some point in life you’ll start realizing that you are doing more on the teaching side than the learning side. Oddly enough that seems to be when you learn the most, as you try to teach others what you once learned yourself. Jumping in with both feet to teach others will help you find more and better ways to pass on your own knowledge.

my Daughter learning to use sights with a **Daisy air rifle** and soda cans

The raw lessons that are coded in your brain may have never been spoken, only thought. And forcing your brain to decode those lessons, and turn them into words that another person can understand helps you understand it better yourself.

mule deer, howa, howa mini, mini, 6 arc, 6mm arc, us optics, — my wife has been hunting with me for years, her deer spotting eyes have greatly improved, picking out her own targets now. With her latest mule deer buck taken with her little **Howa Mini 6 ARC**

These conversations can be deeper and even more meaningful when shared with family and close friends. A personal touch to each lesson especially for a child or loved one can make it not only easier to remember, but a core memory for their outdoor future.

Junior practicing with his little **Remington 700** and **Minox scope**

Final Thoughts

No matter where you find yourself on life’s timeline, you always have something to learn and something to teach. Finding a way to share what you’ve learned with others can be not only helpful, but lifesaving in some cases.

Different perspectives can also be helpful. Just because you’ve done something a certain way doesn’t mean a fresh perspective from someone else might not help you do it better. Becoming a better outdoorsman is a long and valuable life lesson, and for me personally it has only shown a need for more humility.

But above all, learning and teaching an outdoor lifestyle has given me more than enough adventure for both myself and my family. It makes for a life well lived.

-CBM