Advertisement
Hunting
I couldn’t tell if the roar came from the creek or the rain pelting trees and leaves around me. It was raining that hard. Saturday, Nov. 11: A sky as soft gray as my son’s stuffed dog rained without mercy on Dukes Creek Woods Conservation Area and the rest of northeast Georgia. The downpour raised…
Four Atkinson County men have been charged in the killing of a western cougar. The south Georgia cat may have been the offspring of a cougar released to test the habitat for the possible release of the endangered Florida panther. On Oct. 29, 1995, a dead cougar was found in a ditch north of Willacoochee.…
Dry leaves, the cold, dead husks of another summer, were twirling down in sheets over the swamp, blanketing the dry ground, dotting the surface of the black creek water, piling up against limbs that hung in the current. Sweet gum leaves cracked under the hooves of the Cemetery Buck as it plodded slowly beside a…
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye just as I pulled my rattling antlers apart. I slowly turned for a better look; but whatever it was that had made the movement was no longer visible. I softly blew a grunt tube, and at the sound of the grunt the buck jerked his…
Darkness was beginning to lift when the deer that Jay called the Bay Buck came creeping through a list mist to the sheltered side of the Hornets Nest. The buck made no noise except for the droplet-sounds of icy water falling from its hoofs. It passed through the flooded tupelo and black gum on the…
When the Cemetery Buck finished rubbing the oak, the tree was already dying. The straight, slender trunk of the turkey oak sapling had drawn the buck across a hundred yards of wiregrass prairie. It stood among other young trees and sapling stalks, but something about the one tree pulled at an instinctive cord, and the…
Like the proverbial kid in the candy store, I couldn’t decide what I wanted first. Should I pitch a jig to slack-water log jam in hopes of a largemouth, or go after spotted a twitch bait in the eddy below the shoals? The Oostanaula River in Gordon and Floyd counties looks so good, if you…
A 5-foot-long, 140-pound vasectomized cougar that wandered into Georgia from a Florida wildlife experiment last fall reaffirmed what wildlife authorities have insisted for decades. “If you think you’ve seen a cougar, you probably didn’t see a cougar,” said Vic VanSant, a Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR) biologist, ‘This cat was in Georgia six months,…
By Pam Holland In late October 1994, my husband Charles called me on my car phone while I was on my way home from work as clerk of the court in Candler County and asked if I wanted to go with him to his deer stand while he hunted. After the way my day had…
In 1991, Georgia’s hunters and fishermen were told about a new land acquisition program called Preservation 2000, which Governor Zell Miller was personally creating to acquire 100,000 acres of wildlife habitat, parks and natural areas by 1995. Hunters and fishermen were told that they would participate by paying for 30 percent of the land through…
Become a GON subscriber and enjoy full access to ALL of our content.
New monthly payment option available!
Advertisement