This Month's Featured Destination:

Spearpoint Ranch

Good Research Results in Steady Growth

When Steve Wirth decided to offer pheasant hunting on his farm, the first thing he did was research what others were doing. He worked on a couple of farms that offered hunting. He talked with a lot of guides. And he studied a lot of magazine articles and websites until he figured he was ready.

In the fall of 2001, Steve and Laura Wirth opened the Spearpoint Ranch for hunting.

Steve bought the ranch in Barnard, Kansas in 1990, and named it after the brand his father had developed, the Bar Lazy V, which looks like a spearpoint. He married Laura in 1996. They have about 4,500 acres, and raise cattle, wheat, beans and milo.

They did have a nice home on the property to live in—that is, until they decided to go into the hunting business.

At that point, Steve and Laura decided to convert their home into a hunting lodge, and to move themselves and their two boys, Dalton and Garrett, into a used mobile home they bought and placed on the property.

A home for themselves will come later.

“Oh yeah, that’s a promise I had to make to Laura,” Steve said. “That was part of the deal. But I think she’s real happy with the way things are working out.”

The first year, they attracted about 20 hunters. Today, that has grown to more than 200 hunters each year. The ranch has about 1,560 acres in two controlled areas, and the rest of the ranch is used for native hunting.

CSA Hunting
A controlled shooting area (CSA) must be licensed by the state. The license allows the owner to release game birds on the property, and to set higher bag limits and a longer hunting season within the CSA. The CSA season can run from early September to the end of March, although few ranches begin the season in the hot September weather.

This compares to the hunting season for native hunting, also regulated by the Kansas Wildlife and Parks, which permits hunting only from the 1st Saturday in November to January 31, with a bag limit of 4 birds. Out-of-state hunters can also purchase a CSA hunting permit for $17, as compared to the standard $72 non-resident permit for native hunting.

“A lot of hunters still try to steer clear of the CSA hunting, in spite of its advantages,” Steve explained. “Many have had some pretty bad experiences on CSA’s. Sometimes there’s not enough game. Sometimes the birds are so tame they won’t lift off the ground. The worst stories are those where the guide has actually taken them off the licensed CSA property, and the poor hunters find themselves confronted by a game warden.”

“To keep from getting burned, the hunters rely on word of mouth to find the legitimate CSA hunting experience,” he said. “At Spearpoint, I buy healthy birds with native genetics, and we really give the hunters the experience they are looking for.”

Steve buys his birds from Larry Tonne, Special T Hunting, another hunting ranch in nearby Beloit, Kansas. (See the accompanying story in this month’s Kansas AgriTourism News-“Bred to be Wild.”)

“I know these birds have native genetics, they’re healthy, and they’ve been raised in huge flight pens so they’ll definitely be strong flyers—good sport for our guests.”

Click here to read the rest of this story.

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Pheasant: Bred to Be Wild

This month’s article on hunting at the Spearpoint Ranch brings up the question of whether bred birds can offer hunters the same experience as those birds that grew native on the farm.

To find out more, we contacted Larry Tonne, Special T Hunting of Beloit. Larry operates both a breeding farm and a hunting ranch, and supplies birds to the Spearpoint Ranch, among others. (www.specialthunting.com)

“We buy one-day old, native strain pheasants from Don Montgomery, Blue Hill Game Birds, in Tipton. They hatch 300,000 to 350,000 birds a year,” Larry said. “We place those birds in a special Breeder Barn for about 2 weeks, keeping the temperature between 94 and 100 degrees.”

Inside the breeder barn are eight cubicles, each about 12 foot by 20 foot, and each cubicle will keep about 1,000 to 1,200 pheasant chicks. After a couple of weeks, doors to the outside run pens are opened to allow the chicks to become acclimated to the weather. For a while, the chicks are driven back in doors at night until they can handle the early spring weather.

The birds are fed a very special diet developed to improve their strength and good health. The diet is a blend of vitamins, minerals, and medications that will protect the birds from infection and disease.

At about 4 weeks, the breeder has a very special roundup. In the pen environment needed these first few weeks, the birds tend to peck at each other. To prevent this, each bird is fitted with “peepers” or blinders so that they are not attacking each other.

Over the next few weeks, the doors are left open more and more between the breeder barn and the run pens, and finally the birds are acclimated to the weather. At about 6 weeks of age, the birds are moved to the large flight pens.

Each flight pen is approximately 150 feet wide by 400 feet long, with heavy brush and shelter for the birds. Except for the netting across the top of the pen, the birds are out of doors in a natural environment, but are provided with self-feeders and self-watering.

“Throughout the day, the pheasants will fly the length of the pen, building their wing muscles to become very strong, healthy birds,” Larry said. “This is the native strain genetics, and the birds we release are just as strong, just as wild, and fly just as well as those born in the brush.”

The Blue Hill Game Birds website states it this way:

“We feel that there are four "golden" rules that must be followed in producing strong flight pheasants.  They are: genetics, nutrition, large flight pens, and good ground cover in the pens.  Our native strain answers for the genetics.  We use only high quality feed right to the end of growth and never try to save money by using substitutes, thus assuring strong and healthy birds.  We use a heavy weed cover in our flight pens to protect the birds and to teach them to use natural cover.  We have over eight acres under net.  We do not deal in the so-called flight/meat birds.  Our birds are raised to fly!”

For more information:

Blue Hill Game Birds- http://www.bluehillgamebirds.com
Special T Hunting- http://www.specialthunting.com
Spearpoint Ranch- http://www.spearpointranch.com

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