Welcome to the website of outdoor writer & speaker Steve Sorensen
The Everyday Hunter
®
Popular Sportsman's Dinner Speaker
Award-winning Magazine and Book Author
Home of The Everyday Hunter's blog, "Mission: Hunter"
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Field Contributor to Deer & Deer Hunting magazine
Mission: Hunter
Now therefore take, I pray thee, thy weapons, thy quiver and thy bow, and go out to the field, and take me some venison (Genesis 27:3, KJV).
God is pro-hunting. That's right, and he has some things to say about the chase. The Bible presents hunting in a positive light. History, science and common sense also inform us about the role hunting plays in the natural world God created.
"Mission: Hunter" is grounded in the moral rightness of hunting from a Christian point of view. It's a blog that addresses hunting topics through the lens of theology for the woods and for hunters who pursue deer and other wildlife in its native habitat,
The Bible does not support the idea (popular with many today) that hunting is immoral or sinful. Hunting is moral, positive, and right for a Christian believer to do. The history of hunting goes back to the days of Noah (Genesis 9:2-3). In the New Testament it was God who told Peter, one of Jesus' closest disciples, to "Kill and eat" (Acts 10:13). Since God permitted the eating of animals, His word on the subject has never changed.
In my mission to pursue Christ, hunting is a platform for sharing the gospel through writing and speaking — Mission: Hunter!
My hearing isn’t nearly as good as I wish it was. It’s not bad in normal conversation, and I don’t have to turn the television up so loudly it bothers everyone else. But in the woods there’s a lot to listen to, and I miss a lot of sounds. I’m not ready to visit the audiologist, but I do need to give my ears an assist. You probably do, too. And we have the perfect tools to do that. They’re on the ends of your arms, just below your wrists. They're called hands. When you’re list
JUST OUT! Don't miss the May 2017 issue of Pennsylvania Game News—it's loaded with solid turkey hunting articles. (Well, OK. I wrote one of them.) If you're a turkey hunter, the whole issue is loaded with great articles on spring gobbler hunting, including articles by Tyler Frantz, Matt Morrett, and several more—even me, with an article titled "A Most Stubborn Gobbler." You'll get stories you can learn from, an article about choosing the right gun, expert lessons on calling,
Did you know you can make the same communication mistake with turkey gobblers that you do with your spouse? That’s right! One of the common communication complaints husbands and wives make is that the other doesn’t listen. Sometimes we get so focused on what we’re going to say that we pay no attention to what the other says. In turkey hunting it happens when you're using a hen assembly call or a fighting purr to locate gobblers. If you make long series of calls, maybe 20 to 3
How well can you hear? Maybe you’re an expert eavesdropper and can hear a whisper across the room. But you can’t hear as well as a turkey can, even if you have a set of “jug ears” on the sides of your head. Most of us have abused our hearing. We’ve done all kinds of things that ruin our hearing. We run chain saws, ride motorcycles, work in machine shops, shoot guns, listen to loud music, walk behind a lawn mower for a couple of hours each week. There’s not a turkey anywhere t
I'll bet you didn't even know there was a video of a Daniel Boone turkey hunt. You don't believe me? Well, I'm not going to let the gobbler out of the bag just yet. Instead, I'd like to ask you to think about hunting accidents for a minute or two—why they happen and what we might do to prevent them. I think (I don't know this) that some accidents happen when a hunter becomes too anxious to take the shot, too focused on filling a tag. Whether that's true or not, one thing is s
It was a privilege on Saturday, April 22, to be involved in a JAKE event held by the Warrior Trail Gobblers Chapter of the NWTF, at Hunting Hills Lodge south of Waynesburg, PA. Along with organizer Guy Hostutler, champion turkey caller Haylee Newell, I helped instruct roughly 50 kids on how to call turkeys. Lots of hunters talk about how to recruit new hunters to the sport in a day when so many things compete with hunting. It takes more than getting a kid to a hunter safety
Do you need a vestload of the latest, greatest gear to bag a gobbler? No. I've found that traveling lightly makes hunting easier, so almost everything I carry fits in one of three categories. FOOD: Juice or water, maybe a small thermos of coffee, a couple of breakfast bars, and maybe some raisins or trail mix. These things add to my success by keeping me going. CALLS: When I took a variety of calls, I never used more than a couple of diaphragm calls, a good box, and a slate o
Back when the popularity of turkey hunting was just beginning to catch, we would read such wise advice as "make two or three cautious yelps, then pause fifteen minutes before you try it again." Now we know that's not wisdom; it's nonsense. Worse, it led rookie turkey hunters to worry, “What if I make a mistake?” Don’t think that way. Although patience is in the turkey hunter's bag of tricks, fear isn't. If you’re a major league baseball player, and the pitcher fools you on th
Experienced hunters will tell you that turkeys head for fields during rain. Why? Here are a couple of reasons: 1. Raindrops slapping against leaves and pitter-pattering to the ground creates lots of noise in soggy woods, which interferes with their hearing as a defense. So, they head for fields where they can rely more on vision. 2. It's easier to feed in fields during rain, but turkeys don’t go to just any field. Bypass old fields full of dead goldenrod and brush, and head
Two or three times each week from now until mid-May, I’ll post some tips about spring gobbler hunting. I’m not the best turkey hunter around, but I’ll share what I know. It might be helpful to those who pursue our greatest game bird. Turkey hunting sure has changed, especially for anyone who began hunting in the 1960's or earlier. If you go back and review books or magazine articles written back then, you'll be surprised at how much even the "expert" hunters didn't know. And
We've all heard the saying, "All is fair in love and war," but do we really believe it? The trouble is, love and war are sometimes hard to distinguish. That's true in the turkey woods. We lure gobblers with promises of love, then we shoot them. Is it love, or is it war? More hunters should realize the springtime gobbler has both love and war on his mind. He sometimes has to go to war to gain his right to love the hen. When gobblers go war over a hen, the sound they make is ca
