December Woman of the Wild

Posted by admin on December 16, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Holly Heyser

Holly A. Heyser, hunting blogger and college lecturer

I am pretty much the last person anyone – including myself – would have expected to take up hunting. I was born in Southern California and have spent all of my adult life in urban areas. After college, I spent 19 years as a newspaper reporter and editor (Orange County Register, San Jose Mercury News, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Virginian-Pilot, Sacramento Bee) before leaving the business in 2006 to teach journalism at my alma mater, California State University, Sacramento. Reporter. Professor.

Urbanite. Not someone you think of as a gunner.

But I have always craved unusual experiences, and hunting started worming its way into my realm of possibility back when I was in my late 30s. I was living in St. Paul, Minnesota, with my boyfriend Hank Shaw, and we were both working for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. We had befriended the hunting and fishing writer there – Chris Niskanen – and what he did was really piquing Hank’s interest. One day Hank announced that he wanted to take up hunting. “That’s fine,” I said. He’s a cook, so I knew he’d eat what he’d kill, which was my threshold of acceptance for hunting.

He was really getting into it, spending a lot of time out in the woods, and pretty soon he started asking if I’d like to join him. I didn’t, because I was busy training for marathons at that point, and I rightfully concluded that I couldn’t fit two activities that intense into my weekends. But a couple years later we moved to Sacramento, and I stopped running, and I finally said I was ready to join him. My first hunt was a pheasant hunt, but what really grabbed me was duck hunting. Half of the ducks in the Pacific Flyway spend their winter in the Sacramento Valley about an hour north of us, and the duck hunting can be amazing. I will hunt anything that I’m willing to eat – pheasants, turkeys, wild boar, deer – but there’s just something about ducks. They’re fast, the marshy terrain is challenging and the worse the weather, the better the hunting. I love a challenge. And ducks taste divine. Duck is by far my favorite meat, followed closely by wild boar.

I very quickly dedicated myself to my new pursuit. I had just started my teaching job and was overjoyed when I realized my winter break covered the last six weeks of duck season, so when Hank was working, I’d drive up to one of my favorite wildlife refuges and head out into the marsh myself, determined to teach myself how to actually hit these birds. (Three years later, I’m sorta kinda getting the hang of it.)

A year to the day after I fired my shotgun for the first time ever, I started a blog about hunting, NorCal Cazadora (www.norcalcazadora.com). NorCal stands for Northern California, and “cazadora” is Spanish for huntress. I figured no one would care what a novice hunter had to say, but boy was I wrong. I quickly found that even the most veteran hunters enjoyed the frustration-filled tales of trying to learn how to do this hunting stuff right. Since, then, I’ve expanded a bit and have begun writing for magazines including California Waterfowl, Delta Waterfowl and Turkey Country, and I’ve done quite a few hunting stories for the Sacramento Bee, which has shown amazing openness to hunting.

I’ve also taken up photography, and do a lot of food photos for my boyfriend, who started a blog shortly after I did – Hunter Angler Gardener Cook (www.honest-food.net) – and writes for a variety of food magazines. I’ll be doing photography for his upcoming book as well.

Writing and photography has opened many doors. I’ve begun doing a lot of volunteer work for California Waterfowl, which graciously honored me with its Artemis Award this year. And I’ve made friends all over the country and world, which means if I can afford a plane ticket someplace, I could probably find someone to hunt with there. I feel incredibly blessed.

Probably the biggest blessing, though, is having been able to enter the hunting world in the first place. I was not naïve about where food came from before I started hunting – I spent some time in the country as a kid, and my family raised a lot of animals for meat. But participating in food, nature and the cycle of life at this level has been a revelation, and it has improved both what I eat and how much I appreciate it exponentially. So many things had to fall into place to get me here: meeting Hank, moving to Minnesota, befriending Chris. There are any number of different choices I could have made that would have put me on a different path. But I got lucky, and I’m incredibly grateful for that.