More women taking up hunting

NEW BURNSIDE, Ill. -- Stephanie Lathrup is in many ways a typical 19-year-old. She likes attending college football games, shopping and watching videos with her friends.

She also likes to shoot deer, wild turkeys, ducks and geese with her 12-gauge shotgun in the woods by her home, then dress the game and hand it to her mother to cook. It's a passion her girlfriends don't share.

"The only person I can hunt with is my dad," said Lathrup as she stroked the soft feathers of a dead turkey hanging by its legs at the Boar's Den Hunt Club in Southern Illinois.

The college freshman was one of a dozen women who gathered in the Shawnee Hills recently to interact with nature in a way more traditionally associated with men.

The women, from late teens school to middle age, spent the day learning to blast clay discs with a 20-gauge shotgun, flick a fishing line across a pond, hit a target with a bow and arrow and back up a truck pulling a trailer -- a difficult feat for either sex.

The one-day, $50 workshop sponsored by the National Wild Turkey Federation is aimed at attracting more women to outdoor sports traditionally dominated by men -- particularly hunting.

And the women are coming.

The number of female hunters increased from about 1 million a decade ago to more than 1.2 million today, according to a recent survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

At the same time, the number of male hunters decreased over the same period, mainly among the under-35 set, said Genevieve Pullis La Rouche, an agency analyst. That slight decline pushed down the total number of hunters by 7 percent over the past decade, she said.

No one sure why

But for some reason, and no one is quite sure why, women in greater numbers than before are donning camouflage, picking up shotguns and going after prey.

Some say it's the next step after accompanying the men in their lives into the field. Others say baby-boomer dads, like Stephanie Lathrup's, are more likely than past generations to pass the tradition to their daughters.

It's not about making the kill, Lathrup said, but "the thrill of sitting against a tree and having a turkey 10 feet away, not knowing you're there. There's nothing like it in the world."