Local resident Chris Overby shot this 168-pound black bear while deer hunting in Amelia.

Another crisp fall day dawns in Chesterfield and birds chirp out their morning songs, welcoming the sun as it rises stage left over the horizon. From the distance, a shotgun blast rings out, carrying across the still morning air.

Welcome to hunting season.

With deer season in full swing, hunters across the state are returning to the woods, hoping to stock their freezers with fresh meat in time for the holiday season.

“I’ve been hunting for 30 years because it is a tradition for my family,” says Wayne Andrews, owner of Castaway Sporting Goods on Jefferson Davis Hwy. “When you are raised doing it, it becomes an addiction.”

In a county with as many rural areas as Chesterfield, the addiction spreads far and wide among residents, with over 1,000 hunting licenses sold this year at Castaways alone. For many of these hunters, the thrill of the kill is far from the only thing keeping them trekking after game.

“You can see a lot out in the woods; in the early morning, you see the night animals taking cover for the day,” says local hunter Rick Owen. “It’s as much fun observing the wildlife as it is to get the kill. People who don’t get into the woods really miss out.”

Like Andrews, Owen’s first forays into hunting came as part of a family tradition.

“I started with my dad when I was eight, but times were different back then,” says Owen. “My family had a farm, so we were hunting for our supplement of meat. Whatever we came across, that was our meat.”

While Owen enjoys deer hunting, his prey of choice is turkeys.

“I’d rather kill one turkey than 10 deer,” says Owen.

Turkeys may be a staple of Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, but hunting them during the fall can be a truly tricky endeavor. With their mating season during the spring, mating calls are rendered useless in the fall, providing a much bigger challenge in the fall. To help compensate for that, many hunters, like Owen, use dogs to help flush out gangs.

“If you go out without a dog in the fall, you might walk for miles without finding fresh turkey signs because their range is much broader in the fall,” says Owen. “Turkeys are not very smart, but their sense of awareness is probably better than any other animal. Their eyesight is better than a deer’s. If they had a deer’s sense of smell, you would never catch one.”

For those not willing to attempt the challenging art of fall turkey hunting, there’s still plenty of other game available for hunters. Aside from deer, hunting seasons range for a number of animals of all sizes, from rabbits, squirrels, and foxes to bobcats, coyotes, and elk.

Hunters may even find a bit more than they anticipated.

While deer hunting in Amelia last week, local resident Chris Overby shot a 168-pound black bear, bagging it on the last day of bear season. It was Overby’s first bear.

“I had seen bear tracks for a couple of months, but didn’t see any bears,” says Overby. “It came out of the woods and it didn’t take me long to figure out what it was.”

Regardless of what game they prefer to chase, most hunters can agree on one thing: keeping up the family tradition.

“The population of hunters has declined over the past 10 years, which is a shame because you can learn a lot by being outdoors,” says Owen. “I get about as much enjoyment taking other people out and calling in turkeys for them as I do hunting them myself.”

nderatto@villagepublishing.com | 751-0421

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