1/28/05 A Flying Bird Is an Elusive Bull's-Eye

ON THE HUNT WITH TRED BARTA
A Flying Bird Is an Elusive Bull's-Eye
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: January 28, 2005

Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times

The star of the Outdoor Life Network show "The Best and Worst of Tred Barta" takes aim at a pheasant during a hunt on a Long Island preserve.
The Outdoor Life Network is now rerunning the first six episodes of "The Best and Worst of Tred Barta" on Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Eastern and Pacific times; 8:30, Central time. Ten new episodes will begin to be broadcast on April 1, on Fridays at 9 p.m., Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
Tred Barta, here on a hunt in Sag Harbor, N.Y., has "a kind of Howard Stern effect," a network official says.

AG HARBOR, N.Y.

TRED BARTA believes many things. He believes that hunting dogs should earn their place by the campfire, and that hunters should earn their trophies the hard way. For Mr. Barta personally, this means hunting pheasant with a bow and arrow, a method only slightly more reliable than trying to catch one with a pair of salad tongs.

Contrary to several years' worth of evidence, he also believes that he will someday get better at it. "Oh, God, that was close," he half screamed, doubling over one recent blustery morning at the Spring Farm hunting reserve here, after two Brittany spaniels had flushed a ring-necked pheasant into the air, and his homemade arrow, shot from a plain wooden longbow, missed the bird by about an inch.

"Did you see that?" he asked his guide, Stan Drozdowski. "It's impossible. It really is impossible, isn't it?"

Mr. Drozdowski, a 35-year hunting veteran, smiled an indulgent smile and shook his head. "Well, it ain't easy," he yelled. And then, as if on cue, rain began to fall in great sheets across the wooded field, promptly ending the hunt.

As mornings in the great outdoors go, it was far from memorable. But as Tred Barta outings go, it was almost perfect. Mr. Barta, a record-holding saltwater fisherman and big-game hunter with no previous television experience, has become the star of a new cable show on the Outdoor Life Network called "The Best and Worst of Tred Barta," which has become an unlikely hit for the network. This is partly because Mr. Barta, 52, is often loud, profane, outspoken and self-obsessed, a camouflage-wearing, knife-wielding combination of Howard Stern, Ozzy Osbourne and Natty Bumppo.

He is also highly critical of most other hunting and fishing shows, which he describes as little more than bland, glorified infomercials for outdoor sports manufacturers. (By implication, if not by name, this includes many shows on his own network, like "Buckmasters," about deer hunting, and "Fishing With Roland Martin," featuring the famous bass angler.)

But Mr. Barta's show, which will begin its second season in April, also seems to have found a dedicated following among outdoor enthusiasts because it gladly shows Mr. Barta pitting his formidable skills against the merciless forces of nature, and failing - sometimes comically. In Colorado, he ignores his guide and makes a mistake while stalking elk, allowing a herd to catch wind of him and ruining hours of effort. (The next day, when he finally kills a large bull elk, he becomes so emotional that he sounds as if he will burst into tears.)

On another episode, filmed on his boat 90 miles off the coast of Long Island, he takes only cereal and milk for his 14-year-old son and the boat's mate, but forgets the bowls. So in frustration, he takes his hunting knife and skewers a plastic jug of milk to make a bowl, spilling most of the milk all over the deck.

In a regular column he writes for Sport Fishing magazine, he commonly describes mishaps even worse that happen when the television cameras are away, like the time he accidentally ran over a raccoon near his home in Southampton, N.Y., and, hoping to take its pelt, got out and grabbed it only to discover that it was still alive. Before he was able to put it out of its misery, it tore into his hand. "Now bleeding all over my truck," he recounted, "I spilled coffee in my lap."

Sitting in that truck the other morning with rainwater dripping from his nose, he said he was not at all disappointed that he had failed to hit a pheasant in flight during the hunt. In fact, in five years of really trying, he has killed only five in flight this way. "I call it the joy of losing," he said.

Over the course of several hours at his home and in the field, Mr. Barta - often referring to himself in the third person - said he was on a mission to bring to outdoor television shows, and to hunting and fishing in general, a sense of humility and respect for nature that he felt was being lost. He rails against the use of increasingly sophisticated equipment in big-game hunting - like electronic listening devices and video cameras to detect animal movement - that he says have turned hunting into a kind of video game. While his use of a longbow and homemade arrows has won him no friends in the animal-rights world, it certainly improves the odds for his quarry.