Want to hunt?
Young hunter Lillian Nemitz embraces her deer taken during the Taylor County First Hunt Foundation’s first mentored youth deer hunt held during the last weekend in September. Submitted Photo
By Matt Frey, The Star New
The curiosity and interest to start hunting can occur at any age. Often times, figuring out where and how to start can be an intimidating challenge.
That’s where the Taylor County First Hunt Foundation Chapter wants to help.
The First Hunt Foundation is a national non-profit organization that started in Idaho and is branching out across the country. It is dedicated to keeping America’s hunting heritage alive.
The Taylor County Chapter has taken off in the last year, providing mentored hunting opportunities for a variety of species for new hunters of all ages. The goal is to create even more learning opportunities as the chapter’s network of mentors, hunting lands and funding grows.
“We’re working on getting more mentors and spreading the word about what we’re trying to do,” Taylor County Chapter president Jena Lee Zenner said in an Oct. 30 interview. “We have a lot of interest, both young and old. We just want to keep spreading that word of we’re going to do it, as long as we have enough mentors, we’d love to take as many kids or adults as we can.”
The local chapter consists of a handful of active members. Zenner is the president, Ron Herman is the secretary and Sean Solberg is the treasurer. Sam Frost and her husband Travis and Zenner’s husband Steve also are among the core members working to get people into the woods and fields. Kurt Haas, the Wisconsin DNR conservation warden for Taylor County has been a great help in getting the local chapter established, Zenner said.
The chapter’s first major group event was a success as a handful of deer were harvested by nine hunters who took part in a mentored deer hunt during the last weekend of September. Little Hills Hunting Preserve just outside of Gilman has served as a great place for mentors to introduce people to bird hunting or shooting sporting clays.
Hunters and mentors are being sought for the next major hunting outing, a mentored turkey hunt during Period B of the 2024 Wisconsin spring turkey season (April 24-30). In between, plans are in the works for an ice fishing clinic at some point this winter. Ideas for a spring fishing clinic are also being bounced around.
“We did the mentored deer hunt and it was awesome,” Zenner said. “We did field to table. We showed them how to prep for the hunt, checking the wind, how to set up your stand and best ways to do it. We had a party with pop and pizza, we showed them how to butcher the deer and all of that stuff. It was really neat. So if they go hunting again, they’ll have that knowledge to keep going. That’s what we want. We don’t want to just be a one-time deal. We want to keep going.”
Zenner’s drive to start a mentorship organization really stems back to her own beginnings as a hunter, for being introduced to upland bird hunting with her husband and their dogs as well as being introduced by Steve to bowhunting for deer. As she soaked up knowledge, she felt the desire to pass it on.
“I was hanging out with a friend of mine and she’s from Georgia,” Zenner said. “She did a wingshooting clinic. I thought that’d be awesome to become a better shooter because there’s nothing like that around here.”
Zenner said at that time she reached out to Rib Lake’s own Kurt Walbeck, the host of Outdoor Bound TV, for advice and some contacts on how to get a wingshooting clinic going, which she eventually did.
“Then I heard a podcast where there were two women in Idaho that were getting all of these women involved, getting them into the outdoors, and I thought this is cool,” she said. “They introduced me to this guy named Rick Brazell (the FHF founder) from Idaho and this is where this is based out of. He is just an amazing guy and is all about getting more people into the fields and into the woods.
“We got the wingshooting clinic going and then more people were like what are you doing, can you take me hunting?”
she continued. “It’s always been a passion of mine to share upland hunting. When Steve and I first started dating, he took me bow hunting for the first time. He loves doing the youth turkey hunt. The club kinda sat idle for a year and a half, almost two years. Then I met Ron and Sean and Sam and they were like, let’s get more kids, let’s start a mentored youth deer hunt.”
The first mentored deer hunt came together relatively quickly, taking just four months from hatching the idea to executing it. About a dozen mentors were lined up. They were required to spend two hours of field time with the new hunters before the actual hunt, which was spent shooting the guns and visiting stand sites. The hunts were all done on private lands so public-land hunters weren’t disturbed at that early point of the fall hunting season.
Steve Zenner said he mentored a young female hunter who missed on her shot at a deer, but it was a moment she’ll likely never forget.
“She could hardly talk because her heart was racing,” he said. “In a blind, you have different windows. We had to readjust four different windows and then we went back around. The deer was staring at us because we were moving so much. My heart was just racing. Finally she shot. She said she just couldn’t control her breathing. The crosshairs were just bouncing. But that’s what it’s all about.”
One of the new hunters was not a youth.
“We had one hunter who was 62 or 63,” Jena Lee Zenner said. “She actually lost her husband last winter. He was a huge hunter and she wanted to extend his legacy of hunting. He bought her a bow hoping they would hunt together. Now she’d like to carry on his legacy, which is really neat.”
Zenner said that is a point the chapter wants to stress. While young hunters are certainly a focus, all ages who want to be mentored are welcome.
“There’s a lot of youth, but there are actually a lot of people who are like semiretired that want to do it,” she said. “Taking out older and younger generations has really been fun.”
Also, hunters who want to try chasing after new game may want to consider a mentored opportunity.
“Let’s say you’ve only deer hunted, but you want to try upland hunting, grouse hunting or even bow hunting,” Jena Lee Zenner said. “You’re a gun hunter but now I have fall available. We can show you how to do it. It’s a first hunt in a new realm. For me, I never bear hunted before, then I went with some friends and thought this is fun. It was a totally different experience.”
Along with the basic how-tos of hunting, Zenner said the mentors, who are all subject to background checks, always pass on the ethical side of hunting to their mentees.
“If you take a kid out at 10-16 years old and they see that you’re not massacring deer, you’re all about a nice shot and doing it right, even if they never hunt again, when it comes to those issues, they’re going to say that’s not what hunters are about,” Zenner said. “That’s not what they’re teaching us. You get a few bad apples, but the majority of us are conservationists. We really care about the populations and things like that.”
As the Taylor County First Hunt Foundation Chapter grows, Zenner said the core group’s goals for the first couple of years are to bring on about 25-30 mentors and 10-15 hunters for the major deer and turkey hunts and to simply spread the word locally and throughout the state about the need for mentors because there certainly are people who want to learn to hunt, but don’t know where to turn.
As the chapter completes more fundraising, it hopes to have more gear on hand for the mentees to use, such as smaller caliber rifles and shotguns and hopes to provide items for them to keep, such as turkey calls or face masks, or fishing poles and jigs at those kinds of events.
The First Hunt Foundation is also looking to launch a nationwide Sharing the HERitage campaign in 2024, aimed at getting more women into the outdoors.
More information can be found on the Taylor County First Hunt Foundation Chapter Facebook page. Zenner can be reached at Zenner Up North Kennels (715-560-8430).
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Annette Harley was mentored Oct. 28 on a pheasant hunt at Little Hills Hunting Preserve.[/caption]
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As a field to table event, new hunters during the Taylor County First Hunt Foundation’s mentored deer hunt not only were able to harvest their first deer, but they helped butcher the animals and prepare the venison for the dinner table.[/caption]
