Muzzle-loader offers one shot at deer

Deer hunting with a muzzle-loader in Arkansas offers a chance to kill a deer earlier than any method other than archery. The season opened Saturday in nearly every deer zone in Arkansas and will continue through Sunday.

Brad Carner, the chief of wildlife management for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, plans to be in the public hunting woods Saturday with his 12-year-old son, like many mentors passing down the knowledge and excitement of deer hunting.

"Growing up in northeast Arkansas, the season framework for the deer zone and the wildlife management areas up there required for modern gun season that you use a shotgun with slugs or a muzzle-loader, so I started out using a muzzle-loader there for the modern gun season, and I've used one for 25 years," Carner said.

The muzzle-loading season has become tradition for the Carner family, he said. Carner's son has hunted with a muzzle-loader for the last three years and took his first deer with the gun at age 9. Carner's wife, who "has harvested three or four deer," he said, took her first buck during a muzzleloader season.

"It's a good option for hunting," Carner said. "Deer are in their pre-rut activities and still can be locked on a food source, but you're also starting to see some buck activity on the trees now of rubs and scrapes, the precursor of the heavy rut activity that people start to see at the beginning of modern gun season."

Ralph Meeker, Game and Fish deer program coordinator, said cooler weather is a plus for the muzzle-loader season. It gets hunters excited about getting into the woods.

"It's typically one of my top two favorite ways to hunt deer, along with archery," Meeker said. "It just provides an early season and then a late season (in December for three days) opportunity. And, it seems like you're able to connect to the more traditional style of hunting when you've got one shot. You take a little bit more time, you have to be a little more patient. The range is a lot different, much shorter than a centerfire rifle."

Both Meeker and Carner note the technological advances in muzzleloaders in the past decade that have led to guns with an average range of 75-100 yards, but which can stretch out comfortably for some shooters to 150 yards or more. Hunting with a bow, Meeker said, usually means you're targeting a deer less than 25 yards away.

"Our annual deer harvest has kind of stabilized to a little over 200,000 a year," he said. "We're expecting a similar number this year. We've had some odd weather, a fairly wet spring and a short, dry summer, and it's starting to rain again."

Sports on 10/23/2018

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