SADLER: Take some time and research

By Tom Sadler Correspondent
Published: October 2, 2008

As a recent Valley transplant, I was pleasantly surprised to learn about the opportunities to improve your hunting and fishing skills, get involved in local conservation efforts and help a kid learn about Virginia’s outdoor heritage. As hunting season approached I was curious to see what public hunting opportunities there were within about an hour-and-a-half drive from my home in Verona.

While I could have easily talked to some of my friends here in the Valley, I decided to play the role of a complete newcomer and start from scratch.

I began my search on the Web. Forgive me if you don’t like computers or the whole Internet business but it is great resource. You are limiting yourself unnecessarily if you don’t take advantage of it. You can go to most libraries and get online if you don’t have access at home.

Ok, end of sermon. Back to the research.

I searched “hunting public land in Va,” and the resulting list included this intriguing item — find game. Since that captured what I really wanted in simply two words I decided to try that first.

The link took me to the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries’ (VDGIF) web-based mapping program. The site gives you lots of information such as locations, species, access points and the quality of the hunting at that location. The site has information on 3.5 million acres of public hunting land in the state. What is really neat is you can search by both location and game species.

I decided to give it a try. I easily created an account and logged in. The home page asked me how I would like to search. I selected location since I wanted to see what was within 50 miles of home. I had a choice of miles from a city, county or zip code. I typed in 50 miles, my zip code and let it rip.

Up came a page with a map on the left and a menu of options on the right. The page showed that I had 16 locations to chose from.

Cool!

I selected Goshen-Little North Mountain WMAS from the list. A new map came up on the left. New information came up on the right. The info gave me a description of the properties and below that a rating of the quality of the hunting for various species.

I clicked on the link to the WMA home page. That took me to a more detailed description, directions to the WMA and a link to a map of the WMA. I gave it all a quick read and clicked on the link to the map.

Hunting access points and parking areas were clearly marked. Now I had something I could take with me and really work with. With a compass and topo map for the area I would be in business.

How about some duck hunting? I went back out to the home page and selected location and species this time. There were only three locations listed within 50 miles of my home so I upped it to 75 miles. I figured what the heck I would probably spend the night wherever I was hunting anyway. At 75 miles I had 10 locations to choose from.

Now, I am a bit of a map geek. Not content to just take what was offered, I looked at the menu of options. There was info, search, map features and legend. I won’t go into a lengthy explanation of how much fun I had playing around with all these features. Needless to say you can spend a lot of time fooling around with, oops, I mean researching where and what to hunt. Give it a try.

In addition to the information I just described the website has easy links to the VDGIF hunting page, the regulations and getting a license. The other important bit of information on the Web site is this – the Department strongly recommends that you contact the local land managers before heading out. Hunting access and regulations can change, so it pays to check.

The Find Game Web site was funded by a grant from the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s Hunting Heritage Partnership program. The Hunting Heritage Partnership provides grants for state-level hunter recruitment and retention programs. These grants are used to increase hunter access to public and private lands, help recruit new hunters and create more hunting opportunities.

There are some important things to consider once you figure out which public lands you want to hunt on. By definition, public lands are just that — public. That means they are apt to see more hunting pressure than leases and clubs.

I do almost all of my fishing on public land and the same rules apply for hunting as do for fishing.

If you want to find success in the field you need to work at it. That means scouting, getting off the beaten paths and understanding what habitat is attractive for the wild game you are pursuing. Doing a little research on-line and in the field should help you take advantage of the abundance of public land we have here in the valley.

Editor’s Note: Tom Sadler is an avid fly-fisherman, guide and instructor and founder of The Middle River Group, an organization that provides diverse business expertise to the conservation and wildlife management community and the hunting, fishing and shooting sports industry.

You can contact Tom Sadler by e-mail at