Anderson: With crossbow’s wider use, is the sun setting on the ‘old way’ of bow hunting?

Like a boomerang more than an arrow, the crossbow controversy is coming back to the Legislature.

Some background:

In May 2023, near the end of that year’s legislative session, a conference committee deal was struck to allow any licensed Minnesota archer to hunt deer with a crossbow.

The proposal never was heard in a committee and no testimony from the public was taken. Nor did the DNR weigh in about whether arming tens of thousands of bow hunters with crossbows for 3 ½ months was a good idea — for deer, or for deer hunting.

Before the change, only Minnesotans older than 60 or who had a physical impairment could hunt deer with a crossbow.

Now, with virtually no practice and with the ease of squeezing a rifle trigger — and with nearly as much accuracy — anyone, from teenager to octogenarian, can waylay a Minnesota whitetail with a crossbow

Is it a watershed moment that foretells the end of bow hunting as it has generally been known since 10,000 BC?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But for certain it inches closer to history’s waste basket the type of stick-and-string archery practiced since this nation’s founding by the quintessential bow hunter Fred Bear, as well many other archers, famous and not.

Seemingly like everyone else these days, many hunters want a quick fix. For them, a dead animal is the point of hunting, and the quicker that goal can be achieved and, in many cases, posted on social media, the better.

Anathema to this is the practice required to shoot a traditional or compound bow accurately, consistently. Stilling the mind is part of this — no easy task these days — as is repetitive shooting at varying distances until the archer and the bow become one.

As a concession to reason, the Legislature did require the Department of Natural Resources to study possible effects of the archery switcheroo on the state’s deer population. Lawmakers also sunset the law in May this year, requiring legislators to reconsider it this session if they want to renew it.

Presumably, this will mean hearings will be held, the focal point of which will be the requested DNR study.

But there’s a problem. The study won’t be done until October. Meaning if legislators reauthorize widespread crossbow use for the coming fall season, they’ll be taking another shot in the dark about its ramifications.

“Part of the study is a questionnaire that we’re just now sending out to archery hunters to gauge their opinions of their hunts,” DNR big game program leader Barb Keller said. “In the questionnaire we’ll be asking a bunch of different questions about crossbows.”

What’s already known is that crossbows have caught on quickly with Minnesota hunters. In 2023, the first year they were allowed for unrestricted deer hunting, sales of resident archery deer hunting licenses rose nearly 6% from the year before, from 90,589 to 95,619. Also in 2023, youth archery license sales jumped 14%, from 8,306 to 9,466.

Though the 2022 and 2023 total archery deer harvests remained about the same because of, the DNR believes, a smaller whitetail population in 2023 than in 2022, this past fall saw a near record archery deer harvest in Minnesota. What’s more, 48% of the kill was by crossbow, while harvest by what the DNR calls “vertical’’ bows, — meaning, for the most part, compound bows — trickled up 7%.

Primary among factors the DNR is studying about crossbows is how many of these archery harvest increases are occurring in Deer Permit Areas (DPAs) where antlerless (doe) permits are issued to gun hunters by lottery.

In these areas, archery deer hunters don’t need a lottery permit to kill an antlerless deer — meaning if the doe kill is increasing in these DPAs because of to the increased use and efficiency of crossbows, deer numbers there might suffer.

DPA 178 in northeast Minnesota is one such area. In 2022, when there was no widespread crossbow use, 97 adult deer were killed in DPA 178 by 896 archers. Of these, 50 were bucks and 47 were does.

In the same DPA in 2023 — a year when the deer population was suspected to be lower than in 2022 — 100 adult deer were killed by 949 archers, a sizable jump in the number of hunters. Of the 100 whitetails felled, 57 were does, 34 of which were killed by crossbow users.

When the same breakdown is done for 2024, still more archers likely will have hunted in DPA 178 and other lottery areas, and still more, probably, will have used crossbows. Proportionately, the doe harvest by this method in these areas likely also will increase.

This represents a potential problem for DNR deer managers in areas such as the northeast, where the goal is to increase whitetail numbers by holding down the doe harvest. One response could be to require all archery hunters, whether they use vertical bows or crossbows, to draw antlerless permits in lottery areas, just like gun hunters.

The bigger question about crossbows is whether hunters using them should be allowed the same 3½-month long season that archers using compound and traditional bows get.

Gun hunters, after all, including muzzleloader users, get but a fraction of that time in the woods, and their weaponry is only marginally more lethal than crossbows, if at all.

And yet, I get it. There’s no going back.

Crossbow manufacturers are by now happy to have Minnesota as a market, archery shops are making money selling crossbows, and the DNR isn’t going to turn away license sales.

Plus, using crossbows, more people can kill more deer more quickly, which apparently is the goal nowadays. Just like cruising North Woods trails on an ATV to shoot more grouse more quickly has become a goal, as has employing forward facing sonar to catch more fish more quickly.

To me . . . none of this feels right. And regarding bow hunting for deer, the old way just seems a better fit, a stick and a string.

I’ll concede that three seasons ago, I missed a good buck that I probably would have killed with a crossbow. And last year, as a test of my patience, I went a lot of days in a stand without seeing anything within 30 yards of me that I wanted to shoot.

But this year, a buck at 27 yards made a mistake, and my arrow was true.

“I hunt,” Bear said, “because I love the entire process: the preparations, the excitement and sustained suspense of trying to match my woodslore against the finely honed instincts of these creatures. On most days spent in the woods, I come home with an honestly earned feeling that something good has taken place. It makes no difference whether or not I got anything: it has to do with how the day was spent.”