WINGMASTER1
New member
I took my 2 sons ages 14 and 12 and a friend of theirs age 11 to Dillon for the youth pheasant release hunts and was angrily disappointed in our division of wildlife who manages this area. I have hunted the pheasant releases there for 15 years and it has been pretty good. My boys were able to get plenty of shot opportunities in previous years and had lots of fun, but this year was as awful for opportunity. The D.O.W has leased a lot of the wildlife area to farmers and we found 80 percent of the fields available to hunt last year were in standing corn 8+ feet high. I called the D.O.W district in Athens and found out these lease are for 5 years, so things will get no better here. After expressing my concerns to a supervisor they refered me to call the Woodberry office as to these are the guys who actually manage the area. I spoke with the gentleman who actually signed the farmer leases and he admitted to signing away more ground then in the past but tried to make an excuse that generally the corn would be picked and it would not be that big an issue. I disagree that the corn would be all picked by the last 2 weekends in September and hunting pheasant in cornstalks is not the best situation in my opinon i'd much rather hunt a weed field where my german shorthair can point on a holding bird as opposed to running the open cornstalks.