Kansas Wild Turkey Hunting

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Kansas wild turkey hunting is by OTC tags, all day long hunting for fall and spring turkey season and Eastern and Rio Grande Turkey makes Kansas a flexible turkey hunting state that will fit into anyone's schedule.

This Kansas turkey hunting article assumes the reader has not reviewed our overall turkey hunting approach. If so, the links at left will be more informative.

Spring turkey hunters may prefer our Kansas spring turkey hunting season article or read about our Kansas Rio Grade Turkey hunting.

With Kansas having liberal turkey hunting seasons and Mid-America Hunting Association having a flexible approach of turkey hunting all season long on private lease land, few turkey hunters have reason to stay home. We will take the mystery out of where to go turkey hunting within productive Kansas regions and on the right kind of turkey productive habitat.

With all that Kansas turkey hunting has to offer it is often overshadowed by its high output neighbor, Missouri.

Missouri can boast its country high turkey harvest rate due to accurate accounting through its check-in system requiring all harvested birds to be counted. Kansas does not have any such requirement leaving it to simple and incomplete voluntary turkey hunter surveys accounting for toms harvested.

This leaves many to believe that Kansas turkey hunting is far better than what is nationally advertised through the state wildlife department and magazine article writers. That is fine with us. Kansas turkey hunts are good, bird numbers high, plenty of flocks and the scouting is easy.

There are a lot of turkey harvest and live pictures on this website. Just to look at the picture of the turkey and not observe the background habitat will be to ignore important habitat details of where birds are to be found. These are some examples.

There are plenty of spring breeding season strutting pictures as well as these winter and fall pictures that combine into a more complete understanding of the habitat these birds occupy throughout the year. Three themes will come through. The first is crop fields will always be part of any turkey photo. Waste grain is the number one food source for turkeys from fall through spring green up. Spring time will find sprouts and bugs that carry through the summer to the next fall. The next element will be a roost site that may be as thin as the tree line above or thick to the point the tree stand cannot be seen through. In nearly every case the roost trees regardless how large the wood lot will be on the crop field side. The final element during spring scouting will be the tall weed or grass patch the hens will use to nest. That nesting area that anchors the hens controls the tom behavior in terms of location. The successful hunter puts all three of these elements together for his scouting or hunt.

The key element in this picture is not the beard on the tom, it is the water puddle. The instant before this picture was taken where the turkeys are seen reacting to our presence by moving away had them ringed around the puddle getting a drink. Water sources to varying degrees of intensity from Missouri west to the end of Kansas have importance. Turkeys must drink every day and knowing the local watering point to the three elements above also helps to interdict daily movement patterns.

Gary, a Pennsylvania big woods turkey hunter, made the transition to central mid-west agricultural land turkey hunting with this Kansas tom. He will admit all his success comes from setup, call and decoy. He tells how his run and gun Pennsylvania turkey hunting techniques have not served him in Kansas.