Slowly and carefully, the hunter eases toward his prey. He takes what seems to be an infinite amount of time to make one step. His eyes are scanning upward, but each step is taken with the utmost care. His foot pushes slowly down into the bed of dry leaves on the forest floor.
Although his quarry is a young gray squirrel weighing all of one pound, he is stalking it with the same intensity of hunting a bull elk. He moves slowly, carefully, without breaking sticks or making other noise.
The goal is to get in range before his prey knows he is there.
The above is in a lot of ways the essence of still hunting for squirrels. In the Southeast, we inherited this form of hunting from the likes of Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton. The early pioneers didn’t survive all the time on big game such as deer and bear. Sometimes small game fed their families, and squirrels were a big part of that.
As time went by, squirrel hunting remained a common activity for hunters. In many states, deer and turkey populations dropped over time until they were low or almost nonexistent well up to the 1970s. Squirrels filled the gap and were a very popular game animal. The opening of squirrel season was a much-heralded event, a lot like the opening of deer season today. I can well remember Dad talking about opening day sounding like a “young war” in some areas.