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Field Ethos
Guest
By Neil Emery
The Flint Hills of Kansas is well known for prescribed burning, cattle and producing mature whitetail bucks with heavy bodies and strong antlers. It’s also 98% private land. If you want to hunt there, you can take your chances on the small amounts of public land, or you can start knocking on doors. Conversely, there are a number of outfitters available, or you can put in the work and cash to find some land to lease. A number of years ago, I applied for a special license to hunt the area, though my wife prefers that I call it a marriage license. Eighteen years of return trips suggests the license was worth it.
If you’ve ever driven across the Flint Hills of Kansas in late March through mid-April, you may have seen the fires. Not just a little, but of the roughly 4 million acres encompassing a swath of eastern Kansas and part of northern Oklahoma, nearly a third of it is ignited in a prescribed burn over a short period of time each spring. When wind and weather conditions are right, crews burn through the night. This can affect air quality in neighboring states. Ranchers in this area burn their pasture to improve the forage quality and nutritional value for cattle grazing. It’s a cattleman’s paradise—you’ll see angus everywhere. You’ll also see an abundance of deer blinds, stands and corn feeders.
The Flint Hills has low whitetail herd densities unlike the farmland areas in further eastern Kansas. With the lower deer population, finding an edge is helpful if you don’t happen to have a corn or bean field on your property. Even if you do, those fields are often harvested before or during the November rut and typically picked bare long before the December Kansas rifle season. Attractants are widely used, the most popular of which is corn. It doesn’t take long at a farm & ranch supply store to see large volumes of corn wheeled out the door each fall. That’s just retail. Others, especially farmers, buy it commercially through a local agronomy business.
When it comes to feeders, there’s a million opinions and preferences floating around. We’ve tried many types and tactics over the years. From simply dumping out corn from a pickup’s cake feeder to cheap gravity feeders that continually get ruined to electronically timed spreaders and eventually to Boss Buck 350-pound gravity feeders. We’ve never wanted to change since implementing the Boss Buck feeders. Sure, I’d love a 1,200-pound version, but the ability to easily move the 350-pound version is something we need when burning pastures or tilling food plots. It’s big enough to stand up to the brutal winds but light enough to be easily movable by one person when empty.
Over the past eight years of using them, I have yet to unclog and clean up any moldy corn. I cannot say that for other designs we’ve tried. We have stuck primarily to the gravity, free-feed system. We go through quite a bit of corn, but when we keep feeders full, the does keep coming in consistently. If the does come consistently, the bucks will follow. If the feeders lapse, it takes a little time to get the deer back as our ranch is big on grazing land, but short on thick bedding area. We could save some corn by implementing a spreader, but with easy access to corn and years of success, we’re happy with the gravity feed option. I was initially worried that mature bucks might not want to eat out of the feed ports—that worry went away the first season we tried the Boss Buck 350.
The Boss Buck 350 is about as no-nonsense as a feeder gets. The hopper is rotomolded HDPE plastic—thick-walled, UV-protected, and genuinely impervious to the elements in a way that cheaper feeders aren’t. It holds 350 pounds of corn (capacity varies with protein pellets or other attractants), and it sits on 78-inch galvanized steel legs that’ll handle Kansas wind without drama. The signature feature is the patented gravity head: three feed ports angled at 10 degrees with a 1-inch overhang and a drain hole at each tip, engineered specifically to shed water before it has a chance to pool and turn your corn into a science experiment. A three-way inner sleeve lets you dial the flow rate up or down depending on what you’re running through it—corn, pellets, soybeans. The lid is deliberately loose-fitting to allow ventilation, which keeps condensation from building up inside the hopper.
While so-called purists are quick to criticize baiting, it’s a way of life here and in other locales like Texas. Booners are still no guarantee, even with feeders. Mature bucks still have an uncanny ability to remain elusive, but if you can attract the does, your odds of having an encounter with Mr. Big go way up.
One of the best advantages of using feeders is the opportunities it creates for young and new hunters. Over the years, my kids have all shot their first deer in Kansas. We focus on food plots with the added allure of a feeder. Some years the food plots are nothing more than grass and weeds; the feeders keep the deer coming. Sometimes we stalk in the pastures, but in our case, doing so typically pushes mature deer off property. Both of my daughters arrowed their first bucks last November from ground blinds less than 20 yards from a Boss Buck 350. In both cases, does arrived first, milling around the food plots and eating corn from the feeder. Bucks eventually came through, pushing the does off the feeder to have a bite themselves. Keeping quiet and getting set up for a shot at short distance when you swear the buck can hear your heartbeat is always a thrill, especially as a new hunter.
Cost: Retail ranges from $550-$630.
Pros: Size and weight allow mobility, strategic drain holes prevent mold, tough materials with no rotting, rusting or leaking.
Cons: Free gravity feed means you’ll be refilling weekly. Take care to put the three-port gravity feed on correctly, or they will be pointed directly at the feeder legs … don’t ask me how I know.
The post Steal Your Neighbors’ Deer (Legally) appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
The Flint Hills of Kansas is well known for prescribed burning, cattle and producing mature whitetail bucks with heavy bodies and strong antlers. It’s also 98% private land. If you want to hunt there, you can take your chances on the small amounts of public land, or you can start knocking on doors. Conversely, there are a number of outfitters available, or you can put in the work and cash to find some land to lease. A number of years ago, I applied for a special license to hunt the area, though my wife prefers that I call it a marriage license. Eighteen years of return trips suggests the license was worth it.
If you’ve ever driven across the Flint Hills of Kansas in late March through mid-April, you may have seen the fires. Not just a little, but of the roughly 4 million acres encompassing a swath of eastern Kansas and part of northern Oklahoma, nearly a third of it is ignited in a prescribed burn over a short period of time each spring. When wind and weather conditions are right, crews burn through the night. This can affect air quality in neighboring states. Ranchers in this area burn their pasture to improve the forage quality and nutritional value for cattle grazing. It’s a cattleman’s paradise—you’ll see angus everywhere. You’ll also see an abundance of deer blinds, stands and corn feeders.
The Flint Hills has low whitetail herd densities unlike the farmland areas in further eastern Kansas. With the lower deer population, finding an edge is helpful if you don’t happen to have a corn or bean field on your property. Even if you do, those fields are often harvested before or during the November rut and typically picked bare long before the December Kansas rifle season. Attractants are widely used, the most popular of which is corn. It doesn’t take long at a farm & ranch supply store to see large volumes of corn wheeled out the door each fall. That’s just retail. Others, especially farmers, buy it commercially through a local agronomy business.
Slinging Yellow Gold
When it comes to feeders, there’s a million opinions and preferences floating around. We’ve tried many types and tactics over the years. From simply dumping out corn from a pickup’s cake feeder to cheap gravity feeders that continually get ruined to electronically timed spreaders and eventually to Boss Buck 350-pound gravity feeders. We’ve never wanted to change since implementing the Boss Buck feeders. Sure, I’d love a 1,200-pound version, but the ability to easily move the 350-pound version is something we need when burning pastures or tilling food plots. It’s big enough to stand up to the brutal winds but light enough to be easily movable by one person when empty.
Over the past eight years of using them, I have yet to unclog and clean up any moldy corn. I cannot say that for other designs we’ve tried. We have stuck primarily to the gravity, free-feed system. We go through quite a bit of corn, but when we keep feeders full, the does keep coming in consistently. If the does come consistently, the bucks will follow. If the feeders lapse, it takes a little time to get the deer back as our ranch is big on grazing land, but short on thick bedding area. We could save some corn by implementing a spreader, but with easy access to corn and years of success, we’re happy with the gravity feed option. I was initially worried that mature bucks might not want to eat out of the feed ports—that worry went away the first season we tried the Boss Buck 350.
The Boss Buck 350 is about as no-nonsense as a feeder gets. The hopper is rotomolded HDPE plastic—thick-walled, UV-protected, and genuinely impervious to the elements in a way that cheaper feeders aren’t. It holds 350 pounds of corn (capacity varies with protein pellets or other attractants), and it sits on 78-inch galvanized steel legs that’ll handle Kansas wind without drama. The signature feature is the patented gravity head: three feed ports angled at 10 degrees with a 1-inch overhang and a drain hole at each tip, engineered specifically to shed water before it has a chance to pool and turn your corn into a science experiment. A three-way inner sleeve lets you dial the flow rate up or down depending on what you’re running through it—corn, pellets, soybeans. The lid is deliberately loose-fitting to allow ventilation, which keeps condensation from building up inside the hopper.
Boss Buck 350 Delivers
While so-called purists are quick to criticize baiting, it’s a way of life here and in other locales like Texas. Booners are still no guarantee, even with feeders. Mature bucks still have an uncanny ability to remain elusive, but if you can attract the does, your odds of having an encounter with Mr. Big go way up.
One of the best advantages of using feeders is the opportunities it creates for young and new hunters. Over the years, my kids have all shot their first deer in Kansas. We focus on food plots with the added allure of a feeder. Some years the food plots are nothing more than grass and weeds; the feeders keep the deer coming. Sometimes we stalk in the pastures, but in our case, doing so typically pushes mature deer off property. Both of my daughters arrowed their first bucks last November from ground blinds less than 20 yards from a Boss Buck 350. In both cases, does arrived first, milling around the food plots and eating corn from the feeder. Bucks eventually came through, pushing the does off the feeder to have a bite themselves. Keeping quiet and getting set up for a shot at short distance when you swear the buck can hear your heartbeat is always a thrill, especially as a new hunter.
Cost: Retail ranges from $550-$630.
Pros: Size and weight allow mobility, strategic drain holes prevent mold, tough materials with no rotting, rusting or leaking.
Cons: Free gravity feed means you’ll be refilling weekly. Take care to put the three-port gravity feed on correctly, or they will be pointed directly at the feeder legs … don’t ask me how I know.
The post Steal Your Neighbors’ Deer (Legally) appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
