LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE:
Interviewer: I’m going to count it down. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Hello everybody out there in Whitetail Rendezvous community. Today we’re going north of the border. Yes, we’re going to eh company or eh land. How do you say that, Ashley? Eh?
Ashley: Which? Sorry.
Interviewer: Ashley Robertson of Blue Sky, Alberta. She’s a Communications Coordinator at the Dunvegan Fish and Game and volunteers in the out of doors with the fish and game. Ashley, welcome to the show.
Ashley: Thank you for having me.
Interviewer: You’re welcome. Now, Ashley, you told me that you had a funny story about how you started hunting. Let’s start up the show with that.
Ashley: All righty. Well, I wasn’t raised in a hunting family. We didn’t hunt. We didn’t eat wild meat. We didn’t have trophies on our walls and so I was very against it. I didn’t want deer heads in my house. I didn’t want to eat the deer meat. I didn’t want nothing to do with it at all. I met Trevor and we’d been together for three or four years and I was adamant. I wasn’t having guns in my house. There were no deer animals going on my walls. He’d grown up hunting but he put up with me. So we didn’t have any of that stuff. Then one time I was at a girlfriend’s. We were at their cabin and they have a beaver problem. So she talked me into going beaver hunting and I shot my first beaver with a .22-magnum and I haven’t looked back.
Interviewer: Wow.
Ashley: And the first, actually the only, right now the only deer head on our wall is mine.
Interviewer: Wow, good for you. You’ve been hunting, like you said, three or four years. What, you know, I know up in Alberta country it gets cold, windy. Let’s talk about your hunting season, when you start hunting and let’s just talk about that.
Ashley: Our whitetail season opens on September 17th and it closes November 30th so we have a really long season. The whitetails don’t really start moving until the end of October, beginning November. But we have lots of time to scout them out and learn their pattern because they do have a pattern as far as I can tell.
Interviewer: Sure. Now are you archery hunting, rifle hunting?
Ashley: I’m rifle hunting. I’m not ready to shoot anything with my recurve yet. I’m not confident enough in my abilities. Interviewer: Now are you practicing with a bow then?
Ashley: Yes, I have a recurve. Don’t ask me what kind because Trevor just gave it to me. I don’t know.
Interviewer: So it’s a traditional stick and string then.
Ashley: Yeah.
Interviewer: Not a compound, not a wheel bow or –
Ashley: No, old school.
Interviewer: Well that’s good. In our warm-up, you were talking about your terrain and the various game and fish laws that are quite different than for us down in the United States. Let’s talk about that for a little bit.
Ashley: Okay, so in Alberta we aren’t allowed to bait deer. We can’t have food plots. We can’t use like the minerals and stuff that they have. We are allowed to use them for pictures but they have to be gone by the time hunting season starts. We only get one buck tag and there are two supplemental doe tags but I don’t like hunting does so I don’t. I don’t know. I guess it’s really, up here in the Peace region, there’s a lot of, a lot of bush cover for the whitetail.
Interviewer: Explain what the bush is to the people down in the United States, down here who haven’t been up in Canada. Because you grow huge deer. I mean, there’s no question about it.