Thousands of hunters took to the woods last week, enjoying the peak foliage season and hoping to bag a deer for their freezer three full weeks before the hectic regular hunting season begins.

Don’t call your local game warden – these men and women aren’t poachers. They’re bow-hunters, taking advantage of the special privileges that have prompted more than 14,000 Mainers to take up bows and arrows.

Bowhunting is the one of the fastest-growing outdoor sports in America, and Maine is no exception.

At least 13,400 people held bowhunting licenses last season, according to the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. The Maine Bowhunters Association boasts a membership of 4,000 and a full-time lobbyist in Augusta.

“It really started to grow about six years ago, and it hasn’t looked back,” said Mike Rovella of Winthrop, the organization’s legislative lobbyist.

In fact, bowhunting is one of the only game sports that’s not in decline. Rovella links the sport’s success to urban sprawl.

“It’s driven by [human] population growth,” he said. “Rifle hunts are getting compressed into smaller and smaller areas.”

As the amount of land open to rifle hunters shrinks, turkeys and deer are becoming nuisances in suburban areas. Hunting the surplus animals with a rifle is not an option. Local ordinances often bar the “discharge of firearms” within city limits.

But a bow is not a firearm, Rovella explained. “If I had permission from a landowner, I could stand on his deck and shoot a deer in his garden right in the middle of town.”

IF&W sees this loophole as a solution. Dozens of communities in the southern half of the state, including Bangor, Augusta and Portland, have too many deer, and biologists aim to reduce the population. So DIF&W created a special expanded archery season for these areas, beginning Sept. 7 and running all through the fall deer season and beyond, until Dec. 14.

Throughout the month of October, archers can hunt deer anywhere in Maine without competition from rifle hunters, who are not allowed to hunt until the regular deer season begins Nov. 4.

Last fall, bowhunters tagged more than 2,200 deer, two-thirds of those during the special archery seasons, according to department records. In the last five years, participation in the special deer archery season has increased more than fivefold, from 1,400 to 5,000.

At the end of October, Maine will hold its first fall turkey hunt, a two-week season set aside just for bowhunters.

In fact, bowhunters can participate in any legal game-hunting season, but the increased opportunity to hunt offered by the special archery seasons is the major factor attracting new people to bowhunting.

“A lot of hunters are seeing this as a means of being in the woods a lot longer,” said Dave Teufel, a spokesman for L.L. Bean. The sporting goods retailer has seen a “boom” in the sales of archery equipment in recent years, he said.

Bows cost between $250 and “as much as you want to pay,” said Phil Paradis, a salesman at Archer’s Edge in Old Town. The local business has seen “steady growth” since it opened in the mid-1990s.

But as bowhunting booms, so has public concern over hunting in such close quarters.

Rovella dismisses the fears, saying that arrows can fly only a short distance in a wooded area. The average deer shot by MBA members is 18 yards from the hunter. By comparison, a rifle hunter might be as far as 75 yards away from a deer he kills.

In fact, archery is attracting families who see it as a safer option than a gun, he said.

“We’ve never had a fatality,” Rovella said. “Bowhunting is the safest of the safe.”

Bowhunting is a gentler, quieter version of the typical deer hunt, fans say. Jeff Hopkins of Winterport compares bowhunting to fly fishing.

“You have to get so much closer to your game. You have to be much more conscious of yourself,” said the MBA president.

An archer will sit in a tree stand for hours, just watching and waiting.

“When you sit on a tree stand for four, five, six hours, there ain’t nothing to watch but the wildlife,” Rovella said. “I’ve had chickadees land on my arrow.”

“Whereas with a rifle it’s usually a quick, ‘There it is – shoot it,’ bowhunters are watching the animals in their environment. We have to wait. There is no instant gratification,” he said.

Just learning to bowhunt is a challenge, taking at least a year of practice. Though he’s an experienced rifle hunter, it took Hopkins three years of trying before he shot a deer with his bow.

But for dedicated bowhunters, the sport is its own reward. It’s about learning how to stifle a sneeze, sitting silently as a black bear feeds on beechnuts and disappears into the forest.

“Taking game? That’s just the icing on the cake,” Hopkins said.