One day while driving near the Duke Forest, I noticed a signpost prohibiting entrance into the forest due to hunting. The city of Durham, I thought, of all places to kill things. With its plentiful personalities and quirks, Durham sure does have a myriad of activities to choose from: Duke basketball, Durham Bulls, the Durham Performing Arts Center, the farmer’s market—the list goes on. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that you could also spend your free time in the city hunting in the Duke Forest. But I have to admit, I still was.
To find out the story behind that strange sign, I turned to Marissa Hartzler, a program director for the Forest. She explained that when it comes to deer, the Duke Forest actually has a serious overpopulation problem.
A recommended deer population where they are healthy, frisky and frolicking is 15 to 20 per square mile. In 2006, when the Duke Forest staff members conducted their first spotlight survey, they found the density to be almost 50 deer per square mile. Not only did this cause a problem for the deer—who were reproducing so quickly that they were starving—it also had researchers frustrated.
With deer en masse, plants were consumed at an intense rate, leaving scientists without the foliage needed to perform their studies. So in the winter of 2006, the Duke Forest staff conducted a one-month hunt in accordance with the Wildlife Resource Commission to see if changes could be made. As Hartzler recalls, “Two specific locations were selected, from which 23 deer were taken.” But it wasn’t enough. “Staff knew that the approach had to be much more comprehensive, and should take place during the regular hunting season,” she said.
So in 2008 the Duke Forest, participating in the WRC’s Deer Management Assistance Program, allowed hunters to harvest a limited number of bucks (males) and all the does (females) they could find. The hunters were from two groups contracted specifically by the Duke Forest—a group with guns and a group with bows.
“Safety was everyone’s utmost concern, and so guidelines were developed with help from Duke administrators, including the Duke University Police Department, Risk Management and Communications,” Hartzler said. “Each hunter had to attend special training, and under no circumstances was hunting open to the public.”
That all made sense, but I was still curious about the hunters. How did they feel about hunting in their own forest?
I asked my roommate, the epitome of the Asheville outdoorsman, what it was all about. He pointed me in the direction of senior Matt Pridemore, the supreme student-hunter (consider it a tandem name, like student-athlete). Pridemore is the first of his kind to trek and hunt in the Duke Forest.
He remembers it as a pain in the “round” to get permission to hunt in the Forest, but that it was well worth the effort. First he had to write a letter to Executive Vice President Tallman Trask. Then came a couple of meetings with the Duke Forest directors and Duke Student Government President Mike LeFevre, a senior. But eventually Pridemore had tracked down the necessary individuals, filled out the paperwork and earned the certification to allow him to bow hunt in the woods of the Duke Forest.
His reasoning was simple: The Forest was as much a part of Duke as the LSRC or Perkins Library. If he could take out a book, why couldn’t he take out a deer? The legality was obviously more opaque than that, but Pridemore and two other students eventually were permitted to bow hunt in the 2010 season.
“It was really a matter of convincing the administration that we understood and were willing to accept the responsibility associated with the hunting program,” Pridemore said. “[Administrators] are in a tough position because the deer need to be removed, but that’s hard for some people to understand.”
Raised in Buford, Georgia, Pridemore killed his first deer at the ripe age of 11. In fact, during his teen years hunting was a regular thing.
“Hunting in general is pretty common where I’m from, but it is something that is almost always passed down from guys’ fathers,” he said. “Statistically, there are very few hunters whose fathers didn’t hunt, so it was kind of natural for me since dad was always a big outdoorsman.”
When his father bought 2,000 acres of land in Hancock County, N.C. when Matt was young, it was supposed to be a business investment, but with his son’s keenness for hunting, it inevitably became a hunting reserve. And once Matt and his brother saw it as their territory, the infatuation grew.
Hunting, as I came to find out, isn’t like a video game, where you have rounds of ammunition and millions of deer to kill. Nor is it a venture that you can simply pick up with a to-do guide. And bow hunting is an almost entirely different sport from hunting with guns. It requires a certain personality. You must exhibit a genuine curiosity and willingness to learn both outdoor skills and bowman practice, which in turn results in the odd paradox of a “respect and kill” mindset. You can’t simply pull the trigger and walk away.
“Bow hunting is a whole different ballgame,” Pridemore says. “You don’t have to understand all that much about your game when you can shoot it from 200 yards away, but with a bow they have to be so close that you can’t do anything but cut your eyes. The wind has to be perfect or they will smell you, and your choice of spot is crucial.”
In some ways, Matt, who recently traded his football cleats for track spikes, is exactly the kind of “redneck” you’d expect in a lifelong hunter. With the bright white smile and trademark drawl, golden locks loose in the breeze, he’s the type of Southern boy that makes mothers everywhere swoon with delight. And to top it off, he loves the good ol’ outdoors. But after listening to him talk about his experiences in the woods and how killing an animal made him feel, I’d pin him as more akin to Emerson than any ultra-conservative Republican.
He enjoys the whole process—seeing the wildlife, studying the habits of the animal, and preparing the food sources. Only then is it time for the kill, which Matt admits is still a sad experience. But even after the deer is dead, there’s more—skinning the animal, cutting the pieces of meat and enjoying a meal. “It is satisfying to sit at the dinner table and know exactly where your food came from and the work that went into it,” he says.
Sometimes last fall, he’d spend hours sitting in a tree in the Forest without seeing a single deer. Yet, to him it was all part of the experience. The time sitting in the stand gave him a rare opportunity to hear the stillness of the air, the occasional squirrel scuffle and the knock-knocks of a woodpecker. He could sit up there all day, he says.
In the 2010 season, Pridemore harvested a total of 13 deer, an impressive number for one huntsman. But really at the end of the day, it’s tough being a hunter. They are stigmatized as the Bambi-slayers and are seen as the anathema of the forest. Pridemore sometimes doesn’t even want people to know that he hunts. But what he does want everyone to know is that hunting requires just as much nature-loving as it does hunting practice.
“You really have to be a student of nature to be a good hunter,” he says. “You have to learn all the different types of trees and what time of year they drop nuts or berries; you have to break down the ambient noises… know which birds are which and what that means in terms of the game you are pursuing. It feels good to feel connected to wildlife and the woods.”
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