Hunting At Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge At Risk

Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge, arguably the original epicenter of deer hunting in Georgia, is reviewing its management plan, as is required every 10 to 15 years.

Refuge managers are required to consider the wishes of the public as they formulate their plans. To learn the wishes of the public, they are accepting public comment for the next two weeks. If we don’t speak up now, we lose.

As many of you know, the antis want to end hunting of all federal refuges. The last time time this happened in earnest, back in the early 1990s, Georgia sportsmen were so vocal in their call to preserve deer hunting and hunting in general at Piedmont that hunting was protected and our effort even received acclaim in the esteemed Federal Register, for the volume of public participation at Piedmont.

The time has come to do it again.

The antis are hoping to put us to sleep on this issue; hoping we won’t notice.

Your voice is needed now.

Let’s foil an anti today! We need a sportsman’s tsunami to flood the refuge email with the wishes of sportsmen every where. The deadline for comment is June 12.

To comment, please use the form on this page:

http://www.georgiaoutdoornetwork.org/piedmont_nwr.php

On this page you’ll find a form you can fill out with your comments. When you hit the submit button, the website will send your comments via e-mail directly to Carolyn Johnson, Assistant Refuge Manager at Piedmont NWR. You do not need to be eloquent. But you must respond to be counted!

If you’d prefer to mail or fax your comments, you can download the official USFWS form from the GONetwork website and sent it in.

GONetwork President Steve Burch has also posted his own personal comments on the GONetwork website for your review.

Many good things began at Piedmont NWR. Perhaps we can start to have many more good things here in Georgia by getting involved.

Start with Piedmont NWR today.

You may want to send this information to as many of your friends as you can, including people from outside Georgia. You can bet the antis will be taking advantage of that out-of-state angle. A person on Guam has as much clout as a person in Macon when it comes to management at Piedmont NWR.

Please let the leaders at Piedmont NWR know what you think should happen at that outstanding refuge.