MBA MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
MBA Member Spotlight Gene Wensel After hearing word of Gene Wensel’s recent return to the Bitterroot I felt the urge to reach out and pester him into answering a handful of questions for our newsletter. I’ve read just about everything he has put out there including the many interviews from the past and present. I had my own questions for him and I hope you enjoy his responses! Montana Bowhunters Association has done a great deal to help ensure opportunities for archery hunting including lengthy seasons, archeryonly hunting districts, and education and promotion of archery to future generations. As you know from being involved in MBA in the past, Montana archery seasons are constantly being challenged by bills introduced in Helena. In your opinion, what is the biggest threat to Montana bow hunting as far as the introduction of new bills during Montana’s legislative sessions? The commercialization of bowhunting and why people hunt is our biggest challenge. We need to hunt for the right reasons. Hunting is not a sport, it’s an instinct. It is not a “team sport.” Bowhunting has become an industry geared toward skipping any degree of apprenticeship to make things easier. Modern bowhunters want instant gratification. They are influenced far too much by outdoor television shows that often have a hard time differentiating love from lust. Things like crossbows and muzzleloaders (other than flintlocks or cap and ball guns) do not belong in bow seasons nor should they take away parts of the bow seasons that pioneer bowhunters fought for and obtained. I hate to admit it, but I just started to wear a safety harness while in my tree stands in recent years and not just a rope around my waist. Any memories stand out with tree stand mishaps? I’ve had two accidents in trees. The first was while I was taking down a stand. I had already lowered the stand to the ground. My left foot was on the seventh screw-in treestep when it pulled out with no warning. As I slid down, I caught my rib cage on a lower step and almost gutted myself. Had I not been wearing multiple layers of clothing, the fall would have broken through my skin. As it turned out, I still have a scar. Leaving screw-in steps in cottonwood trees for more than one year is risky. The wood around the screw threads often dies or rots to where the step can pull out under weight. The second event took place as I was climbing down from a stand. I was less than two feet from ground level so I hopped to the ground. When I did, I caught my wedding band on one of the treesteps. It buried to the bone but didn’t cut my finger off.
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BOWHUNTER
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You are the first person I’ve ever heard of to find a few petrified antlers over the years. Do you have a sense of the age of those antlers? Petrification follows mineralization before antlers turn to rock fossils. It takes at least 11,000 years for an antler to petrify. Some of them are millions of years old. Those few antlers that are preserved are initially covered with water, silt, wet sand, mud, etc., and cut off from oxygen for thousands of years before mineralization takes place followed by petrification. The main reason few people find them is because they are very, very rare in the first place and most are still underwater or buried underground. Most people don’t even realize petrified antlers exist. Folks know about petrified wood but anything organic can petrify. I’ve never seen a petrified whitetail antler in any museum. Whitetails have been around for almost 3 million years. Every petrified antler has an untold story that can’t help but make us wonder when the deer lived and how it died. These things are solid rock. They have turned from bone to stone. Fascinating artifacts! The popularity of shed antler hunting seems to be at an all-time high. I discovered my first shed antlers over thirty years ago and have been infatuated with finding them ever since. Strange to some people, I can tell you exactly where I found each one of the antlers I have squirreled away. Do you keep a pile of prized shed antlers? Is there any one shed that you have found that holds more meaning than the others? Shed antlers are God’s work of art. Like human faces, no two are exactly alike. I had a tremendous collection of big whitetail antlers at one time. In the early ‘70s in Flathead County, deer yarding areas were loaded. Few people picked them up and hardly anyone actually went out specifically looking for sheds. One of my biggest disappointments came in 1971 in Kalispell. I happened to stop at a second-hand store. The owner took me out back where he showed me an entire camping trailer filled to the ceiling with hundreds of big, dark whitetail sheds someone had collected. I couldn’t even get inside the camper door there were so many. Most of those I could see were bigger than average. He was asking $200 for the entire trailer load. I came back the next afternoon with $200 to discover he sold the entire lot to Blackfoot Indians that morning. They were planning on cutting them up and drilled them for buttons.
