Hunters heading to Kansas for big bucks in wide open spaces
Like a modern day gold rush, the run on Kansas is growing and the prize with it.
Kansas whitetails are drawing big numbers of deer hunters across state lines every year, including many from Texas.
The attraction lies not only in the king-sized racks for which the Sunflower State has become legendary over the last decade, but also for the bargain prices at which ambitious hunters can fetch the gate keys to buck-rich tracts of land if they are willing to do the leg work required to find them.
While more than one world class hunting spot has been landed over a handshake and coffee at a sleepy town square diner, beating the bushes is the best way to get the job done. Knock on the right country door, and it could result in a cherry sweet arrangement that costs only a fraction of what your buddies are paying to hunt back in Texas -- if it costs you anything at all.
Another bonus unique to Kansas is the gently rolling terrain that often sets up perfectly for bow hunters and the close-range shooting opportunities so critical to their game.
Though much of high plains country is planted in soybeans, corn, milo, alfalfa and wheat, there are huge expanses of wide open grassy range where you can still find wallows and other evidence of the great herds of buffalo that once roamed wild on the landscape more than a century ago. The landscape is a mosaic of tall and short grass prairies, scattered creeks, rivers and drainages cluttered with brush, wild plum thickets and towering cottonwoods. To hear Joe Buck tell it, a 20-acre patch of contiguous timber is a dense forest in Kansas.
Buck is a friend of mine from East Texas who's been chasing big bucks in Kansas for nearly a decade. He's killed some whoppers along the way, and he agreed to tell some of his secrets -- if I kept his true identity anonymous.
Buck has nothing to hide. He's merely concerned about sheltering himself from the ridicule he'll get from overly protective hunting companions, most of whom prefer to keep discussions about their intrastate hunting affairs within a very tight circle.
"I'd really catch some grief over this if my buddies knew I talked," Buck says. "The cat has been out of bag about Kansas for several years, but there are still quite a few hunters who haven't caught on. For big bucks, it is still the best deal going."
Buck first discovered Kansas' potential for growing whopper whitetails in the mid-1990s after a family friend invited him to go pheasant hunting on private land near the Kansas-Nebraska border. The pheasants were fun, but Buck was more interested in the giant whitetails he saw.
"I saw more big bucks than I'd ever seen," he says. "I was amazed."
As luck had it, the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks began issuing buck tags by draw to nonresidents for the first time the following season. Buck applied, drew a tag and killed his first Kansas whitetail with a rifle. He's been hooked ever since.
As time passed, word spread about Kansas' bounty of whitetails. Consequently, large landowners began to realize the antlered cash crop that had been milling around in their fields for years.
"Back when I first started, you could go door knocking and find a place to hunt pretty easy," Buck said. "But once word got out, the outfitters started coming in and buying up all the transferable tags from the big ranchers. That let the cat of the bag that hunters were willing to pay several thousand dollars to hunt."
Buck says most of the large landholdings have since been pretty well picked over, particularly around hotbeds like Comanche, Barber and Kiowa counties where some outfitters are commanding upwards of $5,000 for hunting packages. But he thinks there are still plenty of smaller tracts available for the do-it-yourselfer who is willing to put forth the time and effort to find them.
"You don't need a big chunk of land to kill big deer up there," Buck said. "A 40- to 50-acre tract is plenty if it is situated in the right spot. You might be able to put together three or four places like that for around $500. Add in another $400 for a nonresident tag and license and you've got a world-class place to hunt that you are in full charge of."
Buck says county abstract maps are great tools for locating names and addresses of small landowners. If you don't have the time to go door to door, try to obtain phone numbers.
Classified advertising in small town newspapers is another good way to find possible leads. "You had better have a long tape on your answering machine if you go that route, because you are probably going to get hammered with calls," Buck said.
Lufkin's Donavan Rudd has never met Buck, but he was quick to agree with just about everything Buck said about the availability of small acreage for hunting in Kansas.
"You may not have to settle for something as small as 40-50 acres, though," Rudd said. "There are still some 100- to 300-acre tracts out there if you get out and beat the bushes."
Like Buck, Rudd has been making the trek to Kansas for nearly a decade. He has access to four different tracts of property totaling about 1,000 acres. Interestingly, he has never had to pay a landowner a dime for that access.
"It's been a pretty cool deal," Rudd said. "They have never asked for a penny. They don't expect it. I send them a nice thank you letter and a Christmas card with $100 bill stuffed inside every year. They are tickled to death with that."
Kansas has been good to Rudd in more ways than one. He's collected three bucks that score upwards of 150 Boone and Crockett points, including a personal best 12-pointer taken in December. The monster whitetail grosses 183 B&C points as a nontypical.
"It's neat country where we hunt, " Rudd said. "But it is totally different hunting than what we are accustomed to here in East Texas."
Buck agreed.
"If you were to take a guy who cut his teeth bow hunting in East Texas [to Kansas], he would be in heaven," he said. "The geography is set up perfectly for it. It's a whole lot easier to kill a deer traveling a 50-yard wide strip of woods than it is on 1,000 acres of thick timber."
Buck describes Kansas as wide open rolling range diced up by wooded shelter belts, creekbeds, small wood lots and drainages that the deer use like we use highways.
"The main key is to intercept them when they are moving from point A to point B. That's not to say you can't kill one in the middle of a wide open field, either. Plenty of giants have been killed with rifles that way."
Baiting is legal in Kansas, so lots of big bucks get bushwhacked with their nose buried in a corn pile. According to Buck, many out-of-staters take baiting to the extreme.
"Automatic feeders will work, but they'll really flog a corn pile," he said. "We used to pull a pickup under a grain silo, fill up the bed and dump as much as a ton of corn at each one our stands. We'd do that a couple of times before the season. By the time bow season got there, we'd have ground scrapes and rubs all around our stands. The whole area would reek of ammonia. We'd pull deer in for miles."
Richard McCarty of Alba doesn't have anything against baiting deer, but it's not his cup of tea. McCarty is a veteran Lake Fork fishing guide and archery shop owner who would much rather turn his deer hunts into a good ol' fashioned game of cat and mouse.
"I like to hunt deer," McCarty said. "In my book, that means getting in tight with a buck, without getting in his bedroom, and ultimately running an arrow through him before he realizes I am there."
McCarty has lost more games than he's won, but not by much. He has made eight trips to northern Kansas since 2000 and used his tag three times.
His first buck was a 197 3/8-inch, 16-pointer taken on 200 acres. The second was a 143-inch, nine-pointer shot on 80 acres. This year he brought down a 167-inch, eight-pointer on 40 acres.
It's hard to believe, but the combined shooting distance of the trio of whopper bucks totals 17 yards -- less than 6 yards per shot.
McCarty has secured access to about 4,000 acres through a friend. Should the sweet spot go away, he said he might be tempted to take a serious look at the five-star public hunting opportunities Kansas has to offer. The property is accessible only by walking in.
"If my wife were not hunting with me, I might be hunting it right now," McCarty said. "Some of the public lands are way better than a lot of the private areas. I know of two 180-inch deer that were killed off public land this year."
*
NOTES -- A nonresident buck tag (by draw only) in Kansas costs $322.50. The state's nonresident license is $72.50. To apply for the buck tag draw, nonresident hunters can do so online at www.kpwd.state.ks.us from April 1-30. That 30-day window is the only time draw applications are accepted.
Matt Williams' e-mail address is mattwilliams@netdot.com.
Share this story:
Google
Yahoo
digg
del.icio.us
facebook
Slashdot
