Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Michigan UP vs. Eastern Kentucky for Deer?

Some thoughts for you to consider. I’ve deer hunted on our family farm in Whitley Co (Zone #4) for the last 25 years when my Grandfather Fred deemed there were enough deer to do so.

E-KY is a really varied terrain, from very steep wooded to some nice rolling hills and everything in between. Where strip mining has been reclaimed properly it’s great habitat and where it’s been done poorly it’s a mess. Ours was done in the early 70’s and was done very well. The lake in my pic below was dug for the mining operation.

The deer population has really decreased. Two significant episodes of Hemorrhagic Disease (blue tongue) in a short period (<5 years) and a huge increase in coyotes killing fawns has been the key drivers in our area to decreased deer. 10 years ago, seeing several bucks a day and herds of 4-8 does were common. Not anymore. That being said, there are bucks and hard hunting will get you good ones.

In zone #4 you’re restricted to one buck and then one additional doe the last week of late muzzleloader. For that pleasure the state will extract $335 from you. Perhaps worth it in W-KY with more generous limits but IMO they have gone off to absurd in this and paying taxes on land in KY doesn’t matter. You still get to buy a non-resident license (or not). As comparison, it looks like a non-resident MI license will set you back $171. Is this a massive expense in comparison to others? No. But it shows a significant ass-raping of non-residents that irks me as someone paying property taxes.

There are some really great people in Eastern Kentucky. Then there are a significant set of the population who believe “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine if I can get my hands on it”. My cousin lives in the house on our place and we believe, despite his denials, that he lends the key to the front and lake gates to non-family, they then they feel free to make copies and pass around. They have stolen every piece of metal, including the tractor rim we used as a fire ring, heck they even stole our stacked and covered firewood in October for we had set up for deer camp.

With this in mind, if you build a camp it will get burglarized, it will get squatted in, it will get vandalized, it will get meth cooked in it and eventually it will get burned down either accidently or on purpose and no one, public official or not, will care because you’re not from there. If you decided to buy, I’d go with a small piece of property abutting Daniel Boone National Forest, put in an outhouse and go with a wall tent. The weather during deer season is rarely bad enough that even a nylon wall tent with a wood stove isn’t just fine and usually darn pleasant. Storage units are plentiful and cheap. We pay $300 a year for a 6’x10’ that holds all our camping gear. We used to store it in the barn next to the house but the locals decided they wanted that stuff too.

Some pics from our place.

We own to the top of the hill (right at 1000 acres to hunt between our 680 and my Uncle and Aunt's landlocked places)





CF member Roof



Picture I took just east of our place a couple years ago flying down.