Bowhunters -- young and old -- often can find quick answers on the Web

The other day I was at an affair where a mother had her four-year-old daughter. This child was using an iPod, doing something I had no clue how to do. Technology of this type is moving so fast that by the time that little girl gets out of middle school, she will be using technology that doesn't even exist today. But the Internet does exist, and it is something that more and more hunters are using. No wonder. It is a huge source of information.

Yet, I am continually amazed at the hunters who do not use the Internet for anything.

Their excuse is that "I'm too old to learn to use that stuff," or "Why bother?" Wrong. The Internet is loaded with good information for beginning bowhunters as well as bowhunting veterans.

I have a good hunting buddy who took a great bear this spring. He called the other day to find out where a taxidermist might be located that uses dermestid beetles to clean skulls. He didn't want to clean the skull by boiling for fear of shrinking it before getting it scored. I asked if he had tried the Internet. He had not. So I did, and in 30 seconds I had some answers for him. To further test the potential of the Internet, I googled various aspects of bowhunting. The results were mind-boggling. (Editor's Note: The verb to google means to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the World Wide Web.)

Googling "how to build food plots" gave me 14.6 million hits. Of course, you can't check out all of them, but just going to the first 20 websites listed will give you tons of information on building food plots. As an aside, I googled "putting fertilizer on food plots" and got 17,600 websites with information on soils, liming, fertilizer application, planting, and numerous other aspects of creating food plots. You name it, and it is there.

I went one step further and searched for "how to use trail cameras." Hmmm. Only eight million websites have information on that one. Surely I can find what I need to know in there somewhere. The first 10 sites listed contained all the information I would ever need on the subject.

"How to scout for deer" yielded 1.7 million hits. "Where to find trophy bucks" gave me 329,000 hits. But that search did not give me what I wanted. I was looking for states or areas to hunt. Instead, it just listed various outfitters in different states that used the term "trophy bucks" on their websites.