I’m 71 and originally from a farm 40 miles north of Dodge City, Ks. I’ve hunted that area every year (multiple times each year) since the mid 1960s. This year eight of us and two good labs hunted that area. Due to the drought, the cover for pheasants is pretty much non existent. In anticipation of a very poor hunt, we bought 15 pen raised roosters to hunt. We saw zero wild birds, not even a track. My brother is a farmer in that area, he sees no pheasants or quail.
In 2010 and 2011, eight of us limited (32 birds) in about three hours. And saw many dozen more. The summer of 2012 was an extremely hot and dry summer. The pheasant population was devastated, and it had not recovered much, and last summer erased all the gain in population.
If you can find some land to hunt near irrigation in the very SW corner of Ks, that might provide some shooting.
