-By Rich Miller
Every year it seems that there is more and more to do to get ready for the upcoming hunting season. This year is proving to be no different either. Keeping up with the areas that I hunt locally is bad enough but when you throw in the lease in Kansas it is even worse.
Last week I flew to my home away from home to visit my good friend and fellow Knight & Hale Pro Staffer Mick bowman. Even though we always have a good time when we are together the purpose of this visit was work.
We tried to get as many stand sites prepared as possible before the season opens. Though it will be November before I am there to hunt, when I show up all I will have to do is get in the tree. We were able to get four different stand sites prepared for a hunter and cameraman. We hunt some of these places year after year and we always see a lot of deer activity.
We checked out a couple of new places that looked very promising but it was so thick out there right now and they will look totally different come November. We trimmed some of the brush from around the stand sites and they will only get better after the leaves fall off the trees.
In several of these places we are not able to plant food plots because it is in pasture. The farmers just won’t allow us to plow up parts of their pastures no matter what we are planting. It didn’t matter anyway because the ground was way too wet to allow us to plant anything. Our solution to putting a food source in these places is Moultrie feeders. Most of these pastures are 80 or 160 acres in size so we put a feeder or two in the middle of the property to help draw deer into these areas.
We place the feeders in areas that are natural travel routes for deer and it doesn’t take them very long at all to find them. The does use these feeders on a daily basis and as you well know, where there are does in November the bucks will be cruising through to check them out. These feeder sites are a great place to set up our Game Spy cameras so we know what uses these feeders. It also provides me with a lot of anticipation every week as I wait on Mick to send me the weekly pictures from our cameras.
I was there for five days and we did manage to get a lot of work done but as it always goes there are never enough hours in the day. It was time for me to fly back home before we knew it. It will seem like time is dragging until I get back out there to hunt in November. There is an upside though, bow season opens here tomorrow. If I have never mentioned it before, I love this time of year!
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