BURST
A flicker in the underbrush catches Charlie Coombs’s eye.
Gun slung over a shoulder, the 13-year-old girl walks carefully over rough ground, her gaze sweeping the forest. But the deer is gone, swallowed by green and gold foliage.
It’s a lesson in patience and persistence — one of many Charlie is learning in the B.C. backcountry.
One of a growing number of teen girls who hunt, Charlie is drawn by family tradition and a sense of adventure. Some of her earliest memories involve driving down a logging road near her home in Lumby with her dad and grandpa. In her family, hunting knowledge is passed down not just to sons, but to daughters as well.
Hunting is also exciting, she said in an interview near the top of the Coquihalla Highway. “It’s about achieving a goal for me and experiencing something that not a lot of people get to experience.”
She shot her first wild turkey when she was 11 and her first deer shortly after. Unsuccessful hunts have been just as memorable. She recalls a search for mountain goat that took her up rocky slopes in freezing conditions.
In 2024, 2,504 women graduated from the conservation and outdoor recreation education course, or CORE, an education program required to obtain a hunting licence in B.C., said Jesse Zeman, executive director of the B.C. Wildlife Federation, which oversees the program. That’s up from 628 women in 2000.
Firearms data collected by the RCMP shows the number of teenagers who hold a minor’s hunting licence in B.C. has steadily risen, to 1,606 at the end of last year from 974 in 2018.
Zeman said the number of hunters in B.C. has been increasing since the mid-2000s, despite some attrition as older hunters retire. Approximately 1,000 more hunting licences were sold in B.C. this year than in the previous year for a total of 107,634. The number of CORE graduates was up 6.8 per cent to 9,604 graduates in 2024. Women made up about a quarter of that number, a higher proportion than in the past.
“You can see it when you’re out on the land,” said Zeman. “There’s way more families and groups of women hunting together. Before, it was viewed as more of a guy thing.”
Zeman links the increase to the same societal shifts that have led more girls to play organized sports. In the past, parents might have enrolled their sons in hockey or soccer. In the same way, “hunting was something that men passed down to their sons and grandsons.”
Now it seems natural to him that both his partner and his daughter are hunters.
“For a long time, hunting was mostly done by adult white males, and the culture reflected that,” said Annie Booth, a professor of environmental and sustainability studies at the University of Northern B.C. She excludes Indigenous hunters from that characterization, recognizing the place hunting has in First Nations culture.
“Among the colonial settler population, men would go out, and it was sort of a social occasion, as well as a way to fill the freezer.”
Booth said in recent years, women have started to “reclaim” hunting, getting out with other women or family.
“For hunting to survive, it does have to diversify to include women and new immigrants,” she said, noting that increasing urbanization is one of the factors that contributed to a big drop in hunters across North America in the 1980s and 1990s.
In B.C., that coincided with changes to hunter education, as the provincial government ended classes taught in schools in favour of a private model, said Zeman. The number of CORE grads plunged from 12,000 to 1,800, while the number of licensed hunters declined from a peak of about 174,000 in 1981 to 84,000 in 2005. The result was a “lost generation” of hunters, he said.
Zeman attributes some of the recent growth to a renewed interest in eating sustainably, including among urbanites. He said about 30 per cent of B.C.’s CORE graduates are from the Lower Mainland.
“Hunting is another way for people to connect with their food and understand where it comes from,” he said.
‘You really need a mentor’
Ava van der Gulik didn’t grow up hunting.
After attending a presentation at a Lake Country fish and game club for a school project, the 16-year-old became excited about the connection between hunting and conservation.
With no one to teach her, her interest might have ended there if not for a mentor from the fish and game club. Van der Gulik is among a growing group of new hunters who are gaining traditional knowledge through programs and mentorships, rather than family.
The teen completed CORE and firearms courses in September, 2024, before going on her first wild turkey hunt. She has tags for several other hunts this fall.
“I think you really need a mentor,” she said. “It’s given me that education that’s been passed down through generations.”
Van der Gulik is drawn to animal advocacy and the opportunity to observe wildlife up close. She’s become active in efforts to track chronic wasting disease in deer, working alongside wildlife biologists to set up sampling stations at B.C. fish and game clubs. She noted that hunters provide up to 80 per cent of the deer samples that scientists use to track the fatal disease.
“Hunting takes you places you wouldn’t be otherwise,” she said. “It’s beautiful out there at 4 a.m. You hear the forest come alive.”
Hunting instructor Dylan Eyers said the growth of hunting is encouraging from the perspective of wildlife conservation.
Through his Vancouver-based company EatWild, he helps city-dwellers get in touch with wild food by providing a network of hunting mentors and courses for people from “non-traditional hunting backgrounds.”
“All hunters care about wildlife,” he said, “but I’m not sure we’ve done a good job at drawing in other groups that have the same values.”
He said he sees common ground between people who hunt and people who shop at farmers markets, as both value local and sustainable food.
Eyers believes that connection is more important than ever.
“It breaks my heart to see how B.C. logging and resource management policy have impacted wildlife in our province,” he said. “If the only people talking about this are from Smithers, the message isn’t going to be heard. There needs to be people in Yaletown saying it, too.
“If I can turn all these people into hunters as well as conservationists, that would be incredible.”
Zeman said only a fraction of the B.C. government’s budget goes into wildlife stewardship, with some funding for conservation coming from a surcharge on hunting licences. He pointed to habitat restoration projects and research supported by hunters through the wildlife federation, including projects that benefit species that can’t be hunted in B.C., like owls.
“No one is shooting owls,” he said.
Conservationist Chris Darimont agrees hunters are an important voice and a “very productive, very valuable allyship,” particularly in efforts to protect wildlife habitat. But he said he’s wary of saying all hunters are conservationists, pointing to the contentious debate over grizzly bear hunting in B.C., where he believes some hunters have views at odds with conservation.
“Hunting organizations do important work on conservation,” said Darimont, a geography professor at the University of Victoria as well as a member of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation. He was less certain if individual hunters, by and large, are as concerned with conservation.
“In fairness, not every bird watcher is a devout conservationist either,” he said.
A way of life
For Charlie’s parents, Ronnie and Amanda Coombs, hunting is a way of life and a way to put food on the table.
“There is nothing better than knowing where your food comes from,” said Ronnie Coombs. When he hunts, he knows “how it was dealt with from the minute it was harvested, to the time it is turned into a meal to be enjoyed by everyone at the table.”
Hunting has other benefits as well, particularly for young people, said Zeman. Being outside is good for kids “stuck to their screens,” he said, and it forges bonds between parents and kids, builds confidence and skills to deal with adversity.
Last fall, Charlie had a chance to shoot an elk.
“As soon as I’m out there, I’m focused,” she recalls. “My mind is ready. I do a lot of listening, trying to be quiet, trying to run quietly.”
In the dense underbrush, she struggled to see the elk’s antlers and count the points that would tell her its age. Uncertain if it was mature enough to kill, she hesitated. The elk bolted.
Her dad laughs as she tells the story. From his vantage point, he knew the elk was fair game. But he let his daughter make her decision based on the information she had. It was the right call.
“There will be another chance,” says Charlie.