Before we shoot, we meditate.
It’s 10 AM on the edge of a sorghum field in South Dakota, and I’m standing head-down in a circle of first-time female hunters.
Soon, we will load our guns and attempt to shoot wild pheasants out of the September sky.
But first, Karen Butler, the founder of the female hunting and riflery organization Shoot Like a Girl, asks us to close our eyes.
Butler leads us through an exercise meant to ground us in nature.
What do I hear? The hum of insects, the panting of dogs. What do I smell? Wet earth. What do I feel? The weight of 14 shotgun shells in my front pocket.
What do I wonder?
“Am I going to kill a bird?”
As guns are distributed, Butler tells us to walk “like brides” through the shoulder-high grass; we move at the pace of both wedding processions and funeral marches.
At the rallying cry of rooster, we shoulder and aim our shotguns at the male birds who rise into target range.
We are encouraged but not required to shoot.
Either way, research shows that the act of hunting builds confidence and provides a wealth of physical and mental health benefits.
Because it forces us to be fully present and fully responsible for each other’s safety, hunting offers an unexpected lesson in mindfulness — and women are increasingly taking aim.
According to a 2022 survey by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, we now make up nearly 22% of all hunters in America, more than double the number from 2016. Meanwhile, women who own a firearm increased from 15% to 22% in the last decade.
Organizations like Shoot Like a Girl and hunting outfitters across the country are harnessing the boom in wellness travel to turn the shooting range and the hunting field into the next frontiers of female focused, feel-good travel.
In addition to its mental health benefits, experts maintain that women are increasingly being drawn to hunting for the “field to fork” appeal — think “farm to table,” but with a kill shot— of providing an organic food source for themselves and their family.
Jesse Trespeses-Mercer counts herself among them.
“When people first see me, I’m not what they imagine a hunter would be,” she told The Post.
Trespeses-Mercer, 32, is the daughter of Filipino immigrants. Raised in southern New Jersey, she had never handled a gun before meeting her husband, whose family has been hunting and ranching in Texas for generations.
Open to learning a new skill and eager for “quality time” (her self-professed love language) with her partner, Trespeses-Mercer joined her husband on a deer hunt.
“It was very peaceful, and at the same time every sense was heightened,” she said. “You hear all the insects, every little rustle of leaves. It was a symphony of the woods.”
Even though she didn’t shoot anything, the quietude called her back.
“In my day job, I’m sitting in front of the computer screen,” said Trespeses-Mercer, a copywriter and marketing professional. “Being able to absorb nature and have that intentional focus for a few hours is so refreshing.”
When Trespeses-Mercer became a mother a year and a half ago, she named her daughter Artemis in honor of the Greek goddess of the hunt. And now, her desire to provide her child with healthy food has deepened her commitment to the practice.
“Women are becoming more conscious about what goes on the dinner table. When you put in the physical sweat to harvest and prepare the food yourself, the value of that meal completely transforms,” she said.
In a similar vein Butler, 60, began hunting in the wake of a painful divorce. She found the satisfaction of hitting an archery target — and later being able to feed her sons with an animal she “harvested” — healing.
“When I have a really rough day, I will close my eyes and think back to a time when I was in nature,” Butler told The Post.
Hunting, she says, helps her “remember who I am and what I’m capable of.”
The uptick in female hunters may be more a return to form than a modern revolution, as recent research has challenged the binary concept of men as hunters and women as gatherers.
A 2023 study found that in both modern and ancient societies, 79% of women hunt alongside men.
“At one point we were all hunters; we know that’s in us,” Patti Harris-Baldes, a photographer and the Executive Director of the Wind River Native Advocacy Center, told The Post.
An enrolled member of the Northern Arapaho with Big Pine Paiute ancestry, Harris-Baldes has lived most of her life on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, where buffalo were reintroduced in 2016.
As their numbers have grown over the past decade, she has participated in buffalo hunts.
“There are no words to explain how much growth and healing it’s brought,” said Harris-Baldes, 47, who began hunting with her father at a young age.
In the tribal tradition, a woman makes the first cut when a buffalo is harvested, an honor that connects Harris-Baldes to her ancestors.
A mother of six, Harris-Baldes has been joined on buffalo hunts by her children and grandchildren, braiding past and future.
“I feel so much pride, watching them and watching them watch me; it’s a beautiful, full circle,” she said.
Harris-Baldes routinely leads and participates in women-only hunts, which she says carry a different energy. “There’s this unseen power: sharing food, and sharing knowledge. For lack of a better word, it feels like magic,” she said.
But that magic is slow to spread.
According to research conducted by Shoot Like a Girl, 33% of women don’t hunt but want to.
That includes me, a woman fascinated by the rituals and rewards of hunting but unsure about actually firing on a living thing.
Butler explained that the excitement and loss she feels when she fells an animal, the grief and the gratitude, is an instant distillation of the human experience.
“There’s cheering, and there’s also the recognition that that animal was alive, and now it’s not,” she said.
I did not un-alive any pheasants in South Dakota but I did manage to kill a few clay pigeons at the practice range and in quieting my mind to meet those marks, I got a sense of the peace and power that hunters find in the field.
As Butler assures me “the harvest does not define the experience, it’s the living meditation of being in nature and the reward of being in community.”
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