Southern-Style WHITETAILS

Regardless of how folks below the Mason-Dixon line view me, I’m not a Yankee. I’m from Bloody Kansas, a border state in my great-grandfather’s war. Though I was a boy at the time, I clearly remember the headline when the last-known Civil War veteran passed in 1959.

Back then we had almost no deer in Kansas, and no deer season, but in my lifetime the Sunflower State has developed great whitetail hunting. It is not true that Kansas has a Boone and Crockett buck behind every tree, but we have good deer and a lot of bucks. I’ve always considered Kansas home, and for the last 15 years we’ve had a farm there.

Kansas rifle season is the only inviolable block on my calendar, but there are some problems. While archery season is generous, rifle season runs 12 days and starts the Wednesday after Thanksgiving. Plus, Kansas is a one-buck state. As a hunter, I support this rule; it creates good age-class distribution and a high buck-to-doe ratio. As a landowner, I hate it. We cannot remove bucks with poor genetics except by sacrificing that one buck tag.

So, from a time when I had no local deer hunting until today, when our Kansas buck hunting is exceptional but limited, I have always looked to the Deep South, where seasons are long and limits laughable. I hunted Alabama and the