Advice needed NW KS

C

Carl Spackler

Member
Hoping to get some advice on how to maximize the pheasant potential on these 2 pieces of land. This land is in NW Kansas for reference.

#1 is a 2 acre plot inside of a windbreak where my Grandpa used to dump hay for his cows in the winter. It got pretty tore up so when we moved to more row crops and kept cattle off it for a year it grew up wild with weeds/sunflowers/alfalfa/grass etc and was loaded with pheasant. My dad has fenced off this land and it is now my personal pheasant preserve.

#2 is an old pig/horse pen about 3 acres that has not been used in a while and had hog panels around 3/4 of the area. I've never really hunted #2 because there is all sort of old barb wire/hog panel fencing/random glass or nails laying around.

This spring I spent a weekend out there consolidating the loose wire in pen #2 into piles so that I can hunt it this fall without my dog getting tangled up in a barb wire strand etc.
 

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My big question is does the hog panel fencing stop the pheasants from using area #2 since they can't run under the fence? Basically since we are not going to have any pigs out there (there have been no pigs for 30 years but the fences remain) should we take down the hog panels?
 
More questions. Should I leave area #1 to be overgrown with the same weeds/sunflowers/alfalfa/grass that was there last year or should we actually plant some sort of seed? There is about 60 acres of CRP about .5 miles from this area to the north and the south.
 
Depends on how much time and money you want to spend. About too late to do anything this year. You answered your own question earlier. Pheasants and quail love weeds. The cheap route for me would be to disc down everything I could the earliest I could and sow in a few strips of milo. Let the rest go wild and see what happens. The biologists call it early succession.
 
Weeds feed birds in the winter and make bugs in the summer, all good for wild pheasant and quail! This is nesting season so if it were mine I would be making a plan for next year. Take your time with habitat changes, what takes one day to change with machinery takes decades to undo!
 
I wouldn’t change a thing. Ragweed is great quail feed and sunflowers good overhead cover. If you want a food plot I’d plant one close to but not next to the two weed patches, normal agriculture would be better. I think they’d be a bitch if they were always bunched up in the same spot. Let them spread out.And catch one or two a trip instead of watching a mass flush get away unscathed. I’d leave the hog panels unless they have volunteer trees growing up in them then you’d need to get rid of them both. The hog panels will catch snow and tumbleweeds and make the patch even more appealing to pheasants.
 
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birddude said:
Depends on how much time and money you want to spend. About too late to do anything this year. You answered your own question earlier. Pheasants and quail love weeds. The cheap route for me would be to disc down everything I could the earliest I could and sow in a few strips of milo. Let the rest go wild and see what happens. The biologists call it early succession.
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I meant disc earliest I could in the spring before nesting time.
 
Let me help you. I can give you a free, onsite land use consultation. It will include a thorough survey of the upland bird population. I have an opening in my schedule on November 12th if that works for you.
 
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If it were mine I would convert it all into CRP at some point. My best hunting always involves CRP that is mature. Weeds year to year vary a lot on cover they provide.
 
Best cover I ever hunted in NC Kansas was unharvested dirty milo. Was phenomenal for two years, then needed a make over.
It was a pheasant and quail "hotspot". Yours to play with. Good luck
 
You haven't given us enough information to make a reasonable recommendation. You are dealing with a very small parcel that is greatly affected by what is around it. It makes no sense to go in and spend limited resources to plant food plots if you are surrounded by cropland. So too, it is ridiculous to plant it to CRP if it is surrounded by CRP. What is the limited cover type in the area? What can you do to get the biggest bang for the buck? It may well be that the lower successional plant community your two sites offer is the limiting factor and that is why you are having success now. From just the picture, I think you should start backing the trees to the original tree planting and eliminate the volunteer trees or over time what you will have is just trees. That is much easier to do and cheaper if you start early than to wait for it to be completely overrun. If you think winter food is limited, it is not too late to plant German or Proso millet. If the early succession is the key, a February disking may well re-invigorate the Kochia and sunflowers, giving you a better stand.
 
Carl Spackler said:
More questions. Should I leave area #1 to be overgrown with the same weeds/sunflowers/alfalfa/grass that was there last year or should we actually plant some sort of seed? There is about 60 acres of CRP about .5 miles from this area to the north and the south.
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Leave it alone - your parcels are so small it's just a place for them to hang out depending on the time of day.

If you are from NW or Western KS - you know they like small patches of overgrown weedy cover. Keeping your sprayer away and letting it be would be great.

Listen to Troy on the trees.

Do you have access to a skid loader? You can put a bucket on it and just push all the hog panels in a pile. way easier to take out the fencing that way.
 
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