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Getting Into the Outdoors with Megan Woods

Ice fishing
Fishing, in all seasons, is one of the many outdoors activities Megan loves. She caught this black crappie during an ice fishing outing. Photos courtesy of Megan Woods.

Megan Woods is the coordinator for the New Hampshire Becoming an Outdoors Woman program, helping to introduce women to various outdoor pursuits – from hiking to hunting – and hone their skills in a supportive environment. She has also worked as a land steward and outdoor educator, and during high school volunteered with the Black Bear Study in her home state of New Jersey. With a degree in wildlife ecology from the University of Maine – where she was on the Woodsmen Team for four years – Megan heads outdoors for both work and leisure.

I grew up in the northwest corner of New Jersey, pretty much across from the Delaware Water Gap. It’s a super rural area, with the highest density of black bears in the state. There’s a lot of state and federally owned land there mixed with farmland. My mother, who was a math major in college and just loves teaching, homeschooled my three siblings and me until high school, and we spent pretty much all of our time outdoors or in sports when we weren’t doing school. Being homeschooled really instilled in me a self-driven work ethic. We had a certain amount of schooling we had to do each day, and the sooner we finished that, the sooner we could go outside and play in the woods.

I grew up learning to hunt and fish from my dad, and I still love to share a good hunting story with him and go out in the woods together whenever we can. He had a tree stand on our property in the woods and he’d go and sit out there for a couple of hours after work. I remember going out there with him when my siblings and I were little kids, practicing quiet walking through the woods behind him, and sitting in the stand quietly listening and whispering questions to him.

There is definitely a difference between hunting in New Jersey and hunting in New Hampshire. In the northern area of New Jersey where I grew up, rifle hunting is rarely seen.  Though there is a muzzleloader season, the state is too population dense for longer range firearms. Pretty much all of the big game hunting is with shotguns. I grew up learning archery, because it was the easiest thing for me to practice. And while I’ve shot rifles, I’ve never hunted with one, typically preferring the familiar compound bow. I’ll hunt turkey and ducks with shotgun, but even here in New Hampshire where rifle hunting is common, I’ll archery hunt for deer. It’s just a preference.

It’s way more difficult to successfully locate deer in New Hampshire. You have to put a lot more time in scouting and hunting. There are a lot of differences with land access as well, and I’ve learned different methods of hunting over the years. I do more on-the-ground stalking now versus using a tree stand. It’s evolved over time and I’ve been lucky enough to have had a lot of good mentors. My fiancé is an avid hunter, so I’ve learned a lot from him, but there’s also a good amount that you learn from doing it yourself and becoming self-reliant – figuring it out on your own.

Bear cub
Megan holds a black bear cub to keep it warm while its mother is weighed and examined as part of New Jersey’s Black Bear Study, for which she interned during high school.

My first introduction to a Becoming an Outdoors Woman-type program was an all-women beginner’s waterfowl hunting weekend that I attended off the coast of New Jersey during my college years. The program was hosted through Outdoor Women of New Jersey. We stayed at the historical hunting camp at Sedge Island, and the New Jersey waterfowl biologist came out and taught us about duck ecology and waterfowl habitat. We got to build our own ground blinds and were taken out with duck hunting guides who had hunting dogs and various boat blinds. It was a phenomenal experience. That got me hooked on duck hunting.

During high school, I was a field intern with New Jersey’s Black Bear Study. Because of the large population of black bears in New Jersey and high density of people, there end up being a lot of nuisance bears getting into garbage cans or just being too comfortable around people. We would regularly get phone calls about bears going after birdfeeders, on people’s porches, destroying chickens or farm crops. The goal of the Black Bear Study was to determine the population of black bears in the state, to inform best management practices, and to educate the public on how to discourage bears from coming to your birdfeeder and that sort of thing.

The study helped biologists determine the area that black bears use for habitat, how far they travel, different age demographics, and to monitor the health of the population. In wintertime, they determine where female bears are denning, and they’d go in to find out how many cubs the female has. Working with biologists, we would anesthetize the bear, usually using a 6-foot jab pole, then carefully take the bear out of the den to weigh and measure it. If there were young cubs, biologists would protect them from the cold by wrapping them in blankets or in a jacket while they aren’t being kept warm by the mother.

Usually the cubs are newborns, so they’re very small – but very loud, with large claws, and they try to climb you. The cubs are weighed and measured, sexed, and then tagged in the ear for future identification in the study. Before the cubs are returned to the den, a strong smelling jelly, like Vicks VapoRub, is put on the mother bear’s nose. By the time that wears off, her cubs smell like her again and not like the humans who handled them. If that step wasn’t taken, the mother bear would abandon her cubs once she woke up.

Sawing wood
Megan began competing in timbersports as a student at the University of Maine. Here she wields a crosscut saw during the single buck event at a collegiate Stihl qualifying event in 2016.

Going into college, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. But I knew I liked being outdoors, and I liked learning about habitats and wildlife and all the nuances that connect them. The wildlife ecology program at the University of Maine was fantastic, with lots of hands on classes. All of my favorite classes had amazing instructors. In my Vascular Plant Taxonomy class, the instructor, a doctor of botany, knew every plant name, its theoretical and scientific medicinal uses, and lots of other cool anecdotes about the plant species we studied. He was a wealth of knowledge, and it was so cool to go out and walk natural areas as a class with him. Avian Biology was another really amazing class. We learned about the flight dynamics of birds – how they fly, the physics of it. And also the evolution and divergence of bird classifications – birds have such a cool evolutionary history. That professor was also hilarious, and without fail would have us laughing throughout class.

I met my fiancé, Brad, the second day of college. We were in the same major, lived in the same dorm, and we both joined the UMaine Woodsmen Team our freshman year. Also known as timbersports, the sport is about sawing, chopping wood, axe throwing. When he and his roommate invited me to go to a recruitment meeting for the Woodsmen Team, I thought it sounded like we were just splitting wood for people – it didn’t sound fun. But I went anyway, to see what it was about, and being on that team turned out to be one of the best parts of my college experience. It became a big part of our lives and is still something that we do now over the summer and fall at various fairs and competitions throughout the Northeast.

College competitions are mostly team events. So, for example, you have a bow saw, and you saw through 6 inches of wood, then pass the saw to the next person in the relay, and they saw through 6 inches of wood then pass it off and so on – and whichever team of 6 people finishes first wins. There are also chopping events where you’re splitting a piece of wood in half – not vertically like you would with firewood, but cutting a V on one side and a V on the other side, like you would if you were felling a tree. One event is a two-person crosscut saw. The saw is about 6 feet in length, with a handle at either end, and two people use it to saw though a larger log in a timed event. A lot of colleges have woodsmen teams – UNH, Unity College, SUNY-ESF, Paul Smith’s College, Penn State, UConn, and several Canadian schools. Every fall we’d rent a van, go up into New Brunswick as a team, and compete against U.S. and Canadian college teams in a big international event.

Chopping wood
Megan competes in the underhand chop event during the 2021 Pennsylvania Lumberjack Championships in Schellsburg.

I most enjoy the chopping events. Probably the underhand chop is the one I put the most time into. It’s a very equipment heavy sport, and somewhat messy – you get wood chips everywhere. We’re renting a property right now, and we can’t really make a big mess, so we don’t practice as much as we’d like to. We both compete in local competitions at fairs and then try to make it out to one or two bigger shows in New York or Pennsylvania. The professional competitions and fairs are mostly individual or partner events. You pay an entry fee, and there’s prize money for top placements in each event. While we aren’t the best by any means, we place often enough to make up for the cost of doing the sport.

One of my favorite parts about the timbersports community is that it’s both big and small. The sport is actually most popular in Australia and New Zealand, and lots of European countries also have teams. Here, there are lots of local competitions at fairs, and you’ll see a huge age range of participants. There will be 70-year-olds that have been doing this their whole lives, and who were probably loggers back in the day using this equipment for work – and they’ll be there in their dress shoes, standing on top of a block, chopping an underhand. Then you’ll have somebody fresh out of college who is just starting out. And everyone is competing together. It’s this small, close-knit community. But then there’s also a national competition, sponsored by chainsaw brand Stihl – the Stihl Timbersports Series –with qualifiers by region. The finals are usually in the Midwest, where a win qualifies you for the international championships.

I started working with Fish & Game and the Becoming an Outdoors Woman program (BOW) just over a year ago. We just completed our annual Fall Weekend. The event spans three days and two nights at a camp in the Lakes Region, where we hold four sessions with a total of 37 different class offerings. The instructors are all volunteers and experts in their fields. A participant can choose to take all hunting-related classes if that’s what they want to learn about, or they could take classes such as kayaking, outdoor cooking, and outdoor survival if they’re not into hunting or shooting sports.

What is amazing about the program is that it brings together women from all different walks of life and provides an inspiring and motivating atmosphere to learn in. Several of our participants have said that they met so many other women with similar interests at our programs and have built some really special friendships because of these programs. The BOW program also offers one-day workshops throughout the year for more in depth topics like fly-fishing and off-shore deep-sea fishing.

I’ve always been the kind of person that wants to try everything and challenge myself and do things that people don’t expect of me. I know that it can be intimidating for women to start something new with no background in it, so I really vibed with the BOW mission of creating a safe space for women to learn new outdoor skills alongside other women.

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