Youth Hunting Success | Landon Morgan’s First Deer Hunt

Isn’t it amazing how fast the years can pass by, especially when you’ve got kids at home? Add in work and a little play, and the years just seem to keep rolling by faster. But they say time flies when you’re having fun, so we must be having a lot of it. I sure had a lot of fun this week. It’s the beginning of the Pennsylvania deer hunting season, and our little man went on one of his first youth hunts this week. That is a time (as hunting parents) that you wait for from the day you find out you’re having a kid. Well, it finally happened, and we couldn’t be more excited for him. Here’s how his first youth hunt all unfolded.

As mentioned, we have been waiting for Landon to go on his first youth hunts for years now. At six years old, he is only able to hunt with an adult (a hunting mentor) right now in Pennsylvania. But he’s been practicing a lot with his Mission® crossbow and we were confident in his shooting abilities, so we felt like it was a good time for his first time hunting. That doesn’t mean we weren’t nervous about it – there’s a lot that could go wrong in any hunt, but especially with youth hunts. Even though we would be right there with him the whole time, there’s always that fear that he might not enjoy it or he might miss or wound a deer. Luckily, our situation didn’t play out that way, as you’ll see below. We were all able to go out and hunt for his first time as a family, which is a really amazing experience we were blessed to have.

For his first youth hunts, we set up one of our Ameristep® hunting blinds on a food plot behind the house. The deer had been using it pretty steadily and the deer movement on our farm was consistent. We just hoped that one would come in and give Landon a chance to shoot one. Unfortunately, his first deer hunt didn’t come together that first night with all of us in the blind. I sat with Landon for another mentored deer hunt this week, and things went a little more according to plan. A nice doe came into range and Landon sat on my lap to get his crossbow ready. Check out the video below to see what absolute joy and excitement should look like in a child.

Of all the trophies, of all the big animals we’ve been blessed to take over our lives, nothing has ever meant so much to us as watching our little guy shoot his first deer. And from the way he reacted after the shot and walking up to the doe, it’s safe to say he was pretty excited by his first youth hunts. God is so good and we believe our little boy just fell in love with deer hunting. As hunting parents, there’s really not much that can top that feeling.