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Hunting
Two minutes after midnight on the new moon in August, clouds hid the stars and a light wind kept the mosquitoes from landing on Lee Blantonʼs face. With his rifle propped on a pine limb, Lee flipped a switch on a camo-covered spotlight attached to the bottom barrel of his gun and a two-acre pea…
Georgiaʼs public hunting areas include a mixture of national and state land, including Wildlife Management Areas, Natural Areas, National Forests and a few State Parks that are open for hunting. The choices are scattered all over the state and include a wide variety of habitat and hunting opportunities. So how do you choose one if…
Last fall, as the Georgia deer season began to inch ever closer, the buzz among serious big-buck hunters was heating up. Factor after factor began to align, all favorable, all pointing toward the possibility — no, the probability — that the coming season was going to be a good one for big, mature, heavy-racked bucks. Last year, in…
The hunter had scouted the middle Georgia WMA two weeks before the quota hunt was to begin. He had combined the trip to include a squirrel hunt, along with the scouting, as the area was open to small-game hunting right up to the occurrence of the first deer hunt. One beautiful ridge of white and red…
The cold air had my eyes just about in tears as Martin Johnson and I rolled down a wet four-wheeler trail straight for the Savannah River swamp in Screven County. Just off the road sat a very relaxed Mike Dotschay of Sylvania. He was leaned back on his four-wheeler with his back against a metal…
Jasper County strikes again. Now when you look at GON‘s County-by-County listings each October you’ll see that the best five Jasper County deer listed are Boone & Crocketts! That’s getting right up there with the south Georgia powerhouses like Macon and Worth counties. However, these Jasper County Booners are all from the 1950s and 1960s…
Bowhunters on a Blackbeard Island National Wildlife Refuge bow hunt were kicked off the island by an angry refuge manager who closed the hunt citing safety concerns over a dead rattlesnake. A total of 174 hunters were on the island for the three-day hunt, which began Thursday, October 23, 2003. Thursday evening a dead eastern…
Last fall, on Oct. 1, 2002, I had just returned from hanging a nice doe in the local cooler and was pryin’ my rubber boots off when the phone rang. It was my good friend and fellow hunting-club member Mike Whitehead. “John, Ronald got a good one,” he said. “Great! How big is he?’ “Don’t…
It was still long before daylight on that eventful morning when I settled into my climbing stand. With my safety strap cinched, my possibles bag secured to the side of the stand, and my Thomson/Center Hawkin loaded and capped — I was ready. As I looked up at the brilliant array of stars dancing through…
Read a few hunting magazines this time of year and you’d think there’s nothing to killing a big, mature buck — all you have to do is hunt during the peak of the rut. Of course, if it were that easy, we’d all have a room-full of giant deer racks. Fair-chase hunting is never that…
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