By Rich Miller
All throughout the hunting season, all of us have wanted the weather to turn cold. Well, our wish has been granted because the weather has taken a turn for the better. Over the last week, cold weather has arrived and the deer have started to move. Here in South Carolina, it has picked up some as it usually does around Thanksgiving and some big deer have been hitting the ground.
The funny thing this year was in Kansas – when the rut is normally supposed to be the first of November – it didn’t seem to happen that way. The state of Kansas counts on the rut being the first of November and for that reason they schedule their gun season to open the first Wednesday after Thanksgiving.
This year, according to some of the reports I have been getting, it didn’t work because the deer have been running does like crazy. Several of the guys I know out there that didn’t fill their tag during bow season have taken some great bucks this past week. Normally, the rifle season is pretty tough with the extremely cold weather and the deer not moving very much. This year was just the opposite, though, with the hot weather during November there was very little rut activity and now it’s happening during the gun season.
I just hope with the bucks running everywhere like they have been that a few of them are left over for next year.
I think it’s a great idea to try to have the gun season after the rut, especially in open country like the state of Kansas. I think a lot of other states could learn from this, especially the state that I live in where our gun season is four and a half months long. Our deer don’t get a break from the middle of August until the next year!
Maybe one day the people that we have setting our seasons and bag limits will open their eyes and realize we are going to have to shorten a season or lower an extremely high bag limit in order to make hunting better in our state.
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