Cheap Access For Big Whitetails

Knock on screen doors in August, and you'll have places to hunt in October. Toss a few bales, and they'll tell you where the biggest deer live. You're either daydreaming, or reminiscing. Four or five decades ago, before whitetails had names and grew fat on formula from feeders, back when points meant antler tines not inches, deer hunting had no bearing on the value of farmland. These days, you'll pay dearly for brushy draws, flooded bottoms and thickets that once cost more to clear than the land that grew them.

Take Pike County, Illinois. Deer hunters flock to Pike because its woodlots and cornfields teem with big bucks. Boone and Crockett antlers, all but non-existent in much of the whitetail's range, appear in this part of Illinois regularly. Alas, where celebrity thrives, money excludes. Hunting leases have gobbled up much of the access here. Property once open for hunting without fee is now posted. Lodges specializing in whitetail hunts have proliferated. Some are fancy places indeed, with pricing to match.

Not all the locals like this trend. Brenda Middendorf has tracked changes in land use in five Illinois counties between the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. She works with Two Rivers Resource Conservation & Development Corporation, a non-profit organization started in 1972. In 1994, Brenda helped initiate a program that helps hunters find affordable access--not just non-residents, but anyone who wants a place to hunt. She now directs the Access Illinois Outdoors program.

"AIO has spread to 52 Illinois counties, and we've been invited to start similar programs in Oklahoma and Indiana," Brenda says. They can find full-service lodges or farms that charge affordable daily rates for hunting access. She indicates that bowhunters can reach productive coverts for about $100 a day; fees during shotgun season $150.

To find out more about AIO, I visited Brenda at the program headquarters in Pittsfield. Conveniently, I'd timed my arrival a day before the start of the second shotgun deer season. Brenda quickly spirited me away. Mike Rahe, I learned after Brenda left, lives about an hour away. He and Tom Doubet bought 80 acres in 1993, mainly for a weekend getaway. "I wanted a place to hunt deer," Mike told me. "We've made lots of improvements, logging, planting forage crops like clover, vetch and corn, and building this cabin. We call this Spring View Acres because there's a spring that ran even during Dust Bowl days."

Hunters outside his family soon offered to pay Mike to hunt Spring View. "So I began letting them in. The first seasons we didn't have much for housing, but we didn't charge much either. That suited the hunters fine. They were working people. They wanted a place to hunt, not a lodge."

Hunting almost exclusively from stands during five-day bowhunts, a three-day gun season in November and a four-day gun season in December, Mike's guests typically score over 50 percent.