Kansas Run

KSBrittman said:
The Kansas Wildlife and Parks sure like to make it sound better than it is to attract your out of state dollars .
It’s disheartening to see all the CRP to crop conversion , This another Upland Legacy lost . We will still have pheasants and Quail but less quality habitat means less birds .

KDWPT said our numbers were very similar to last year ,My actual experience with dogs and boots on the ground I would say our pheasant population down 25 to 40 percent .
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I would agree with your post, totally accurate.
 
westksbowhunter said:
KDWP does inflate the numbers to bring in more hunters for sure. But the lack of CRP has nothing to do with the KDWP. That is on the federal government and landowners.
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Agree totally. I hunt NW Kansas and KDWP does an amazing job of recruiting landowners for the WIHA program, but when the Feds allow grazing/haying CRP, most landowners will gladly forfeit the small WIHA payment for the "profit" of hay/grazing. That said, haying/grazing can actually help habitat but it generally takes a couple of years to see the benefit. The CRP program is not designed to benefit hunters, though it does have a wildlife component.
 
I don't even think they are forfeiting the payment, and that does fall on the KDWP. Need to have something in that contract stating if habitat is altered other than crop rotation, the payment is forfeited. WIHA is a program where landowners provide hunting access to hunters, and when that property doesn't offer sufficient hunting opportunities the money should not change hands.
 
It's a fine line. Push the landowners too hard and they won't enroll lands in the WIHA program. I personally feel KDWP field personnel are doing a darn good job walking that line. In the areas I hunt, without WIHA's, there would be virtually no place to hunt, considering the large number of absentee landowners and lessee's.
 
Powderhorn Jim said:
Agree totally. I hunt NW Kansas and KDWP does an amazing job of recruiting landowners for the WIHA program, but when the Feds allow grazing/haying CRP, most landowners will gladly forfeit the small WIHA payment for the "profit" of hay/grazing. That said, haying/grazing can actually help habitat but it generally takes a couple of years to see the benefit. The CRP program is not designed to benefit hunters, though it does have a wildlife component.
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They don't recruit them, the farmers have figured out they can change/improve nothing of their habitat but still collect extra revenue on their place. Then when the state opens up grazing/haying they can double/triple dip and either feed or sale the hay that we are paying them to have access to hunt.
 
GetTothePoint said:
They don't recruit them, the farmers have figured out they can change/improve nothing of their habitat but still collect extra revenue on their place. Then when the state opens up grazing/haying they can double/triple dip and either feed or sale the hay that we are paying them to have access to hunt.
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It's not a habitat program but an access program. Nothing to do with habitat really.
 
KSBrittman said:
The Kansas Wildlife and Parks sure like to make it sound better than it is to attract your out of state dollars .
It’s disheartening to see all the CRP to crop conversion , This another Upland Legacy lost . We will still have pheasants and Quail but less quality habitat means less birds .

KDWPT said our numbers were very similar to last year ,My actual experience with dogs and boots on the ground I would say our pheasant population down 25 to 40 percent .
Click to expand...
At the worst of the drought about 5 years ago, KDWPT advertised that they had more than 200,000 acres of prime ground LOADED with birds. They sort of forgot to tell us that it was all in shooting preserves with released birds. I had hunted KS for 38 years and the involvement of tourism in the process is sickening to me. Give me accurate, reliable information so I can decide if it is worth driving 900 miles to NOT see birds. SD is the same way, just further away.
 
mschnip said:
At the worst of the drought about 5 years ago, KDWPT advertised that they had more than 200,000 acres of prime ground LOADED with birds. They sort of forgot to tell us that it was all in shooting preserves with released birds. I had hunted KS for 38 years and the involvement of tourism in the process is sickening to me. Give me accurate, reliable information so I can decide if it is worth driving 900 miles to NOT see birds. SD is the same way, just further away.
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5 years ago wasn't the worst of the drought at all. Matter of fact, we were very wet in many areas out here. In my opinion to wet. I feel birds fare better in slightly dry weather verse a rainy season. I also dont remember them advertising anything about 200,000 acres. The tourism propaganda was a disaster and all centered around corrupt deer management.
 
mschnip said:
At the worst of the drought about 5 years ago, KDWPT advertised that they had more than 200,000 acres of prime ground LOADED with birds. They sort of forgot to tell us that it was all in shooting preserves with released birds. I had hunted KS for 38 years and the involvement of tourism in the process is sickening to me. Give me accurate, reliable information so I can decide if it is worth driving 900 miles to NOT see birds. SD is the same way, just further away.
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"You can't handle the truth!"

Kidding but that'll be the day and it doesn't sit well with the locals either. I really feel for the out of staters who spend a lot of dollars to come here on false info. I always ask the guys I see at diners or what not what brings them here and they all have the same story of the kdwp website propaganda or an article they'd read in PF echoing the same marketing campaign as kdwp.
 
westksbowhunter said:
5 years ago wasn't the worst of the drought at all. Matter of fact, we were very wet in many areas out here. In my opinion to wet. I feel birds fare better in slightly dry weather verse a rainy season. I also dont remember them advertising anything about 200,000 acres. The tourism propaganda was a disaster and all centered around corrupt deer management.
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So, it might have been longer. As we get older, 5 years is actually 10. Look for the year where the estimated pheasant harvest was only 155,000 and that is the year I am talking about. And the propaganda was an email. I read and deleted it. I was afraid the BS would stink up my computer.
 
mschnip said:
So, it might have been longer. As we get older, 5 years is actually 10. Look for the year where the estimated pheasant harvest was only 155,000 and that is the year I am talking about. And the propaganda was an email. I read and deleted it. I was afraid the BS would stink up my computer.
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2011-2012 -- tailed a bit into 2013 if I recall. But 2011 and 2012 were horrible. Western KS looked like the moon - only places that got rain was far NW KS and SW Nebraska those 2 years if I recall. Got up in the one hundred teens for a high in Wichita during the summer of 2011 or 2012.
 
See? The memory is the second thing to go on a man. I don't remember what the first was.
 
KsHusker said:
2011-2012 -- tailed a bit into 2013 if I recall. But 2011 and 2012 were horrible. Western KS looked like the moon - only places that got rain was far NW KS and SW Nebraska those 2 years if I recall. Got up in the one hundred teens for a high in Wichita during the summer of 2011 or 2012.
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Drought wasn't good but that drought was not as bad as the drought in ND this year and those birds made it through. It wasn't so much the drought that hurt numbers as it was that all that CRP began to expire. I posted the acreage that came out at that time in an earlier post on a different thread. Pheasants can survive drought but they can't without habitat and the habitat had expired. That is why the birds can't recover. We have had rain and still the brood production is terrible. If we had the CRP acres that we had from 1997-2011 even with drought we would see large numbers of birds. Habitat will always influence birds more than weather.
 
The drought years were better than the last two years have been. And after the drought the quail exploded. Somethings going on with pheasants and it’s more than just habitat. The chickens are doing well in the smoky’s , I don’t get it
 
BrownDogsCan2 said:
The drought years were better than the last two years have been. And after the drought the quail exploded. Somethings going on with pheasants and it’s more than just habitat. The chickens are doing well in the smoky’s , I don’t get it
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Been to wet the last 3 hatches. We also had very cold weather at the end of April last year, and the storm that occurred on June 5th in 2020 doomed any hatched chicks and nests. Like I said, I would take drought any day. The chickens are going extinct in the flint hills. In the 70's and 80's they would blacken the sky on my trips out west and back. It was a sight to see.
 
There has been a lot of talk about the change in the type of wheat planted, the stubble height left when it is harvested and the efficiency of farming not leaving much waste grain as well. Combine that with CRP expiration and weather and I guess we ought to be thankful that there are any birds left at all.
 
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