Your Annual Trip with the Crew
You find yourself at your local grocery market fairly early in the morning, trying to get a jump on the crowds. You’re shopping for an upcoming fishing trip you have planned for the weekend.
You and your crew are looking forward to the annual event. The late winter rains have started to taper off, temps have started to climb, and the fish are on the bite. It’s going to be another great trip.
You’ve been methodically checking items off your list, and you’re about three-quarters finished. The next item leads you to the bread section. You cruise the isle a couple of times, but for some reason you can’t find the fluffy loaves. You take another pass, and finally spot the familiar looking packaging. You snatch three of them up, drop them in your cart, and once again grasp for your list.
As you reach for your partially completed shopping list, you mishandle it like a rookie second baseman might fumble a hot grounder, and the list flutters towards the floor. It lands awkwardly in a crack between two product displays. You can see the white list faintly in the grey shadows of the displays, and think you can fish it out if you had something with a long handle. Your mind starts clicking and you remember seeing hand dusters about two aisles over. Perfect. You make haste to the display and return in short order, a two foot duster in hand. It looks like it’s going to be just the right length. You suck up your pride, crawl on to the floor, and start fishing for your much needed shopping list. At first, the hand duster appears to be too short, but after some clever twisting of your hand and elbow, you successfully snare the list, and drag it out.
As you start to turn around, get up from the floor, and dust yourself off, your heart stops as you find a large stranger hovering over you about two feet away. At that moment you find yourself both trying to protect yourself by withdrawing from this intruder, but you are unable to gain any distance as you are pinned up against the display, and simultaneously you start positioning your body to throw a lethal punch.
All the while, you are thinking, “What the #&*@?”
Personal Space
How would you feel in this situation? Alarmed? Ticked off? Probably both, if not in addition to a few other emotions. And what did you do? Nothing. You were minding your business, preparing for a great fishing trip with your buddies. Yet for an unknown reason this stranger just violated your personal space.
Is the scenario just described over-exaggerated? Let's hope so. But we can use it to illustrate an important point. As we develop from infants to children, and then adults, we learn that in interactions with others there are various types of accepted space between each other. These spaces include intimate, personal, social, and public distances. We also know that when we violate those practices it can make both us and others uncomfortable.
Personal Hunting Space
Why the overview of personal space? To further illustrate another important point. The personal space between hunters in the field should follow similar space and distance guidelines we have accepted and practice every day while at the coffee shop, mall, and grocery store. Confrontations in the field between hunters are many times related to this issue of invasion of personal space, or more specifically, personal hunting space.
More experienced hunters are aware of personal hunting space and design their hunts and strategies with this in mind. They have either had the luxury of learning from other knowledgeable hunters or they have learned on their own the hard way, through trial and error, that there is an accepted guideline of personal hunting space. And hunting within that distance is a not ok.
These same skilled hunters have also learned that the physical distance between hunters is significant for several reasons.
One of the most fundamental reasons is the nature of the game itself, the ducks and geese. It’s within their natural behavior to utilize large areas of field or water during their daily activities, especially when making approaches to an area where they want to land. Simply, they need room to do what they want to do naturally. Want proof? Go visit your local refuge during the off season and watch what the birds do with no hunting pressure. No decoys, no calling, no shooting, nothing. You might be surprised.
Unfortunately, new hunters are not always in a position to learn from skilled mentors, and as such will unknowingly engage in questionable hunting tactics as they try to better understand the birds and how to successfully hunt them. It is during this learning process that they find themselves unknowingly creating uncomfortable situations in the field by violating accepted distances of personal hunting space.
Are they to blame? Well, yes and no. If they don't know the guidelines, then how can they be held accountable? But the flip side to this issue is what are you doing about it? Are you actively helping others, especially new hunters, to learn what is acceptable? When you see another hunter in the field practicing questionable hunting tactics, if you have the opportunity, do you ask them where they learned to do what they are doing? And why they are doing it? If not, then you are just as much to blame as them.
It all boils down to this. If it's not acceptable to society to walk up and position yourself face-to-face with a stranger in a grocery store, why should it be acceptable to position yourself in such a way in the field that violates another hunter’s personal hunting space? Simply, it's not.
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Personal Hunting Space
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