Archery Targets
Archery can be classed as a sport or a hobby and it has its own class at the Olympic Games. Archers either hunt wild game animals or aim at targets or both. If you shoot at targets in a competition, it is the collective score of all your arrows that determines your rank in that competition. The nearer the centre of the target that the arrow strikes, the higher the tally.
Target archery can also be sub-divided into two classes: field archery and target archery. In target archery, the archer stands in a fixed spot. If there are a number of archers, they can stand in a row and all shoot together on command from the person in charge of enforcing the rules and safety. Any type of bow can usually be used in target archery, although only compound bows may be employed in the Olympic Games.
In field archery, the targets are of diverse sizes and are placed at various distances. The archer moves around the course, so there is no one fixed shooting spot. The targets may be the well-known round targets with concentric circles or they may be life-size effiges of wild animals like mountain lions, moose and foxes.
The bows used in field archery are more often than not traditional style bows: longbows, flat bows and recurves, although archers may use any bow that they like. When stalking live animals, compound bows are usually used because they are smaller, so more manoeuvrable, yet they are still extremely powerful.
Archery targets are traditionally made from straw bundled and tied together to make ropes. These ropes of straw are then wrapped around themselves like a Catherine Wheel and sewn together. The cloth or paper target is pinned to the face of it.
The other name for these targets is ‘butts’ and many old towns and villages in Britain still have a recreational area called ‘The Butts’. These days they play football or cricket on it, but Henry VIII decreed that all males must practice his archery skills every Sunday at the butts using a longbow, so that there would be a plentiful supply of archers for his army.
In competition archery, every archer aims at his or her own target, but every archer is expected to have exclusively coloured flights, so that if there is a dispute an archer and the arrow can be identified. This is useful for retrieving arrows that have missed the target altogether.
There are usually six arrows shot by each competitor in a round and if they are to be shot from a variety of distances, it is normal to shoot from the furthest distance first. Men usually shoot from 90, 70, 50 and 30 metres, while ladies customarily shoot from 70, 60, 50 and 30 metres.
Archery as a sport appears to be growing in popularity, especially as there is a trend in some countries, like the UK, to make it more difficult to obtain a gun license. They say that fashion goes around and comes back again, well British men are back at the butts working on their archery skills again in greater numbers than there have been since perhaps the sixteenth century.
