alt=Night bowfishing|thumb|367x367px|Modern sport bowfishing often occurs at night, shown here on a specialized boat: raised [[bow (watercraft)|bow platform with powerful floodlights to expose and attract fish during the placid condition of night, often with several bowfishers covering different sectors.]]
Bowfishing is a fishing technique that uses specialized archery equipment to impale and retrieve fish. A bowfisher will use a bow or crossbow to shoot fish through the water surface with a barbed arrow tethered to a line, and then manually retrieve the line and arrow back, in modern times usually with a reel mounted on the bow. Unlike other popular forms of fishing where baiting and exploiting the fish's instinctual behaviors are important (e.g. angling, netting, trapping, and hand fishing such as noodling), bowfishing is similar to spearfishing and relies purely on the fisherman's own visual perception and marksmanship, and usually do not involve using other tools such as hand net.
Historically, bowfishing was practiced for subsistence, but in the 21st century it has increasingly become an outdoor sport, practiced across the United States, that is prone to unregulated waste and disposal of native species. Sport bowfishing is unregulated and unmanaged as of 2026, but the practice has increasingly gained attention and study across disciplines over the past decade. Due to the lethality of the bow or crossbow, catch and release is not possible with bowfishing. Most did not have sights, and aiming was executed by line-of-sight judgment down the arrow. Modern sport bowfishing mostly uses sophisticated compound or lever-action bows, ]]
Along with fishing from boats and off the shore, wading and shooting is also effective as long as the hunter does not mind getting soaked. Wading in rivers allows the shooter to get up close to the fish if the hunter is skillful. When keeping fish while wading, the hunter may use a stringer tied to a belt loop. Standing on large rocks in shallower parts of a river is another technique. This provides a better view higher out of the water. Going from rock to rock in a river with two hunters gets the fish moving if they are inactive. It is similar to herding the fish to the other hunter; while one hunter is wading the other is stationary on a rock. All of these river techniques typically work best for carp or catfish, depending on the location.
Due to the light refraction at the water surface and the optical distortion of the apparent position of underwater objects (which would appear to be shallower), aiming straight at the target silhouette usually results in a miss. Aiming well below the target compensates for this optical illusion. Depth and distance (as well as angle) of the target also impact how far below the fish to aim.
U.S. Open Bowfishing Championship
Each spring, Bass Pro Shops hosts the annual U.S. Open Bowfishing Championships. The 2025 event was held in Memphis, Tennessee. The 2026 championship details have yet to be announced.
Controversy, management status and wanton waste
thumb|397x397px|Sport bowfishing is prone to excessive waste of native species. For example, 100-year-old [[bigmouth buffalo in Minnesota and the cycle of modern bowfishing. See Scarnecchia et al. 2021. and the heightened vulnerability of freshwater fishes and their habitats worldwide further exacerbates the ecological waste of modern bowfishing.
Modern sport bowfishing (occurring in the United States), which is often an effort to amass hundreds of native fish in single outings (sport killing) and to discard them as full-bodied carcasses afterwards, A modern biological understanding of several of these targeted native species (e.g., bigmouth buffalo, black buffalo, smallmouth buffalo, bowfins, quillback, river carpsucker, highfin carpsucker, redhorses) has shown that they exhibit complex life cycles that are prone to overfishing. More than 1,000 native fish can be removed in a single bowfishing outings.