Mike McDaniel suggests that recurve hunters practice under a variety of conditions, and that they practice a lot. He shoots 10 groups of 10 arrows each every day starting in July. Photo by Bruce Ingram

When I was a boy growing up in the South, my mom and dad bought me a recurve. I had begged for a bow because in my 8-year-old heart of hearts, I just knew that I would be able to shoot more easily the cottontails that dwelled in the woods behind our house. My neighborhood chums and I had spent hours fashioning primitive longbows and then had deemed them unsuitable as bunny bows after unsuccessfully spending many more hours chasing after our quarry.

Alas, although Phillip, Michael, Steven and I all received recurves from our respective parents, we were all still unable to arrow a rabbit. And so ended my flirtation with the recurve until I became a father and my son was interested in bowhunting and wanted to learn how to shoot both a compound and a recurve. I didn't know how to help him select the latter category of bow so out of touch was I with this form of bowhunting.

Like many modern-day hunters, I began to bowhunt as a way to extend my deer-hunting season -- not because of any particular fascination with the pastime of archery. And when I did select a bow, my choice was the typical one -- a compound, which is by far the norm for many sportsmen in the region. But if you want to undertake a different and very traditional form of bowhunting, then the recurve is worth a look.

One recurve enthusiast who has been successful in making the switch is Mike McDaniel, a sales manager for Tridim Filter Corporation in Roanoke, Virginia. McDaniel's dad gave him his first exposure to this type of bow when Mike was a youngster growing up in western Arkansas.

"When I was 14 years old, I began to hunt with an old Ben Pearson wooden recurve that had a draw weight of 40 pounds," recalled the 40-year-old McDaniel. "All I wanted to do growing up was to fish and hunt, and my dad's recurve was a way I could spend time in the woods and maybe bring something home for my family to eat.

"As a kid, I liked everything about my bow -- the simplicity in the construction, how light it was, no need for tuning, and the fact that there were no cables. There weren't any deer around then, but I was able to shoot some squirrels and rabbits with my recurve. Heck, at that age, to kill anything was a big deal."

McDaniel used the old recurve for several years, but as was inevitable, his arms grew, the bow aged, and as he notes: "I wrecked the limbs." His dad then bought for him an early compound and thus ended for some 20 years Mike's experiences with a recurve. But not his pleasant memories with this kind of archery tackle.

"By the time I was 35 years old, I, like many Southern hunters, had killed a lot of deer with rifles, muzzleloaders and compounds," McDaniel said. "I don't want to say that deer hunting had become easy for me, it definitely hadn't, but I wanted a little more of a challenge or at least a different kind of challenge, and I found it by going back to the recurve."

The Virginian has mostly stopped pursuing whitetails with a rifle or muzzleloader and also ceased employing a compound for deer, except when he decides to still-hunt for them. Mike maintains that it is simply too hard for him to sneak up on a bedded or feeding deer and move within effective recurve range.

Perspective recurve users should know their effective maximum range, insists McDaniel; for him it is about 20 yards. At distances beyond that, the "arcing factor" comes into play. That means that an archer may have to aim 6 to 8 inches high at distances of around 30 yards. This is definitely a difficult task and decision-making process when a whitetail is approaching and the time to make an assessment is short.