GON Magazine Fuels Youngster’s Reading Skills

Many people who weren’t brought up hunting tend to keep it that way, not necessarily wanting to put in the effort and step out of their comfort zone to learn something new. But that does not apply to Calhoun.

Calhoun is a 9-year-old boy from Athens. On a typical day, you can find him playing outside or practicing in the front yard for his All-Star baseball games in his free time.

Calhoun has been a dedicated GON reader for about a year now. It began one day at Franklin’s Gun Shop when the bold red and white letters on the GON cover page caught his eye. Once he read the issue he picked up, he was hooked! His family subscribed to GON’s magazine soon after.

Calhoun says, “Whenever the magazine comes, I stay up all night reading it!”

His favorite article so far was about a “bunch of kids and their dads going rabbit hunting in north Georgia. I liked it because the kids each told a part of the story.”

Calhoun has dyslexia, so learning to read was a challenge for him.

His mother, Katherine, says, “Since reading was a challenge, it was hard to motivate Calhoun to practice reading. However, he was extremely interested in the content of GON. At first, my husband and I would read it to him. Eventually, Calhoun did not want to wait for us to have time to read to him, and he was motivated by the content of the magazine to challenge himself by reading it on his own. His reading has improved significantly over the past few months, and I believe that having something he was interested in to read has helped his fluency.”

She added, “His reading has improved significantly through his efforts and those of his wonderful teachers, but GON gave him the motivation to put his new skills into practice.”

In the past couple of years, Calhoun has developed his passion for hunting, and it came about all on its own. He has a couple of friends here and there who hunt, but Calhoun’s family doesn’t necessarily have a hunting background.

His father, Bynum, says, “I did not grow up hunting, but had the opportunity to successfully hunt for white-tailed deer once in college. Since then, I have been on a couple of bird hunts with friends but hadn’t gotten back into hunting until Calhoun showed interest.”

Calhoun’s mother had some family members who hunted while she was growing up. She says, “My grandfather was an avid bird hunter, and Calhoun would have enjoyed learning about hunting from him.”

Calhoun has accompanied his father on a quail hunt on private property in Oglethorpe County. They also ventured to Clarks Hill WMA to deer hunt this past season. Calhoun harvested his first game animal during squirrel season on private land in Jackson County. He shot a large black fox squirrel.

Calhoun had been wanting to go squirrel hunting for a while. On Valentine’s Day, his dad took him out to a friend’s farm to hunt. They slipped around in the woods for a while when they noticed something moving in a tree. Calhoun and his dad started circling the tree and kept seeing the squirrel’s head or tail as it climbed higher up in the tree.

Calhoun says, “He finally stopped between two branches, and I could get a shot at him. I was using a 20-gauge shotgun. Just a few pellets hit the squirrel, and it went crazy!”

According to Calhoun, the squirrel then re-situated himself higher in the tree. The gun he used was an over-under. Calhoun re-situated himself and took the shot, but missed. The squirrel was startled by the sound and ran to the very top of the tree, and he could not see it anymore. He reloaded the shotgun, and his dad took a .22 to the other side of the tree to scare it over to Calhoun.

Calhoun says, “That worked well, and I was able to shoot it again.”

The squirrel was a black fox squirrel, which is the largest squirrel in North America. Calhoun and his father field-dressed it and took it home to fry it up for their family’s Valentine’s Day appetizer.

Calhoun’s dream hunt is to hunt hogs with a thermal-scoped rifle.

His mother said that reading through the pages of GON has “fueled his interest in all types of hunting.”

She says, “It has taught him about different types of hunting and let him glimpse into the world of very experienced hunters. He loves learning about different people’s hunting adventures and envisioning what that would be like for him to participate in one day.”

Calhoun is one of many kids who developed a passion for hunting and conservation based on reading about others’ experiences. It is extremely important to teach the younger generation about hunting and fishing for the sake of future game populations and conservation efforts.