By Lynn Lewis, Artemis Georgia

The outdoors have always called me since I was little. Just ask my Moma. She’ll be happy to embarrass me with a litany of stories including the time when I was 6 yrs-old and crossed a very busy road (after being told not to), so I could go to the “woods” in our neighborhood. She wasn’t amused by my cool rabbit story.

Fast forward to my teenage years growing up on a 170-acre farm on the Ware-Bacon County line in Georgia where I really learned how Mother Nature functioned. I worked as the Chief Farmhand clearing land with a chainsaw, on the tractor mowing/planting, tending to the chickens/cows, and with drip torch in hand, set fire to the woods. It was on the farm I also learned to shoot and hunt guided by my father and uncle. I spent many hours alone or with my dogs, .22 rifle in hand, hunting, and camping on the back-forty. I watched the constant life and death dance that I too was a part of, not just when I shot my first squirrel, but when we rehabilitated an injured red-tailed hawk and eventually watched it fly away.

The connection I felt and the experiences I had growing up made me going into the conservation field professionally a given. For 20+ years now I’ve been working with academia, state agencies, private consultants and non-profit conservation organizations to promote conservation of our natural resources. One extremely important aspect of that work is hunting.

Hunting is dying a not so slow death and with it go staunch supporters of our natural resources in voice and pocket-book. Women are a demographic on the verge of becoming a wave of new hunters that can turn the tide. And so are millennials, locavores, and other “non-traditional” newbies. Come join Georgia Artemis as we provide a safe, inclusive, supportive, and FUN environment with lots of opportunities to learn hunting from top-to-bottom from seasoned hunting mentors.

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