Besides waterfowl hunting, we also offer deer hunting at Kent Outdoors. Many guests want to know how we can have duck hunters who like to shoot at the same time deer hunters are at Kent Outdoors who don’t want to hear anything but deer snort or small hooves in the leaves. We have several different guides working with us. Our big game guide guides deer hunters. Some of the other guides guide duck hunters. Our deer hunters hunt on a completely different property than where duck hunters are hunting. We’ve got a lot of territory to hunt in many different places; and the duck hunters will be miles away from deer hunters. The bucks that we take usually will score between 125 and 150 on Boone & Crockett. We have many hunters who take bucks scoring 130–145, and these are all free-range deer. Texas deer are somewhat different from deer in other parts of the South and especially from deer in the Northeast. Our bucks will have small frames and small bodies, so it’s easy to overestimate what their racks will score. In other words, you may see a buck with 125-inch rack and assume he has a 130-145-inch rack. Another thing that many of our hunters tell us is they never see as many deer as they see in our Oklahoma lands. Some of our hunters may be sitting in a stand and have 45 deer walk out in front of him. We have some areas where the hunter may see two bucks for every doe he sees.
We have other places where a hunter may spot four or five does before he ever sees a buck. We’ve got nine different properties where we hunt deer during deer season. Even though our hunters will average taking 125-150-inch bucks, that doesn’t mean we don’t have 200-inch deer. The best buck ever taken here scored 192 inches. However, I’ve got trail camera pictures of bucks bigger than that. But you’ve got to remember that the older and the bigger a deer gets, the less likely a hunter will be to take him. Every year for the last 6 years, I’ve had bucks seen that would score over 180 inches. Some I have trail camera pictures of and some I’ve seen with my own eyes. We had one buck that came off one of our properties that was hit by a truck on the road, and a game warden scored him at 233 B&C points.
We also have plenty of turkeys. In the county where our lodge is, the hunters can take four gobblers per season, but different counties have various bag limits on turkeys. In Grayson, a hunter only can take one turkey per season. In Oklahoma where we have property to hunt, I believe you can take three gobblers statewide, and in some counties you only can take two gobblers, and another county may be only one. So if a hunter hunts with us for 3 days, he legally can harvest two gobblers in one county and one gobbler in another county. The turkeys we hunt are Rio Grandes. Kent Outdoors doesn’t have any eastern turkeys on its properties.
Day 3: Geese, Blinds and Plenty of Waterfowling Fun at Texas’ Kent Outdoors
