Public hunting program gives spot-on help
The toughest quarry for many Texas hunters is simply finding — and affording — a place to hunt.
A little less than 98 percent of the state is privately owned, and landowners almost without exception limit hunting access to family, friends or those who pay (often well into four figures) to lease that private property.
This dearth of easily located, affordable access perennially ranks at the top of the reasons hunters give for abandoning the recreation and a cause of anemic hunter recruitment.
For tens of thousands of Texas’ 1.2 million hunters, the state’s public hunting program provides an answer to that annual quandary. For 31 years, the state’s public hunting program has offered a low-cost option that gives holders of a modestly priced annual permit access to scores of public lands and leased private tracts that can provide opportunities to enjoy hunting for almost the entire range of Texas game animals and game birds.
The latest edition of the public hunting program debuted this week when 2018-19 annual public hunting (APH) permits became available for purchase. Those buying one of the $48 permits will have hunting access to more than 180 tracts totaling just over one million acres. This year’s public hunting program also includes a handful of rule changes that will affect some of the 40,000 Texans expected to participate.
“Chances are, whatever a hunter’s preferred game is — whitetails or waterfowl, doves, quail, squirrels and rabbits, turkey, feral hogs — they can find a property in the public hunting program where they can have a quality experience,” said Kelly Edmiston, public hunting program manager for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the state agency that created and runs the wide-ranging program.
Save the date
The opportunity to take advantage of the 2018-19 public hunting program’s spots begins in just a couple of weeks with the Sept. 1 opening of dove season across the state. One of the public hunting program’s most popular offerings is designed to give wingshooters the opportunity to enjoy the state’s most popular hunting activity.
This year, APH holders will have access to 124 public hunting program “units” where dove hunting is a primary attraction. Those units, totaling more than 46,000 acres scattered in 50 counties across the state from the Panhandle to the Rio Grande Valley, East Texas to the Trans-Pecos, are a mix of public lands and, in many cases, private tracts that the public hunting program leased from landowners specifically for their potential to provide good hunting for doves and other small game.
“The leased dove and small game units have been one of the most popular parts of the public hunting program,” Edmiston said. “They are the reason some people buy their APH permit.”
That popularity is reflected in how the “dove fields” portion of the public hunting program has expanded over the years. Reacting to hunter feedback asking for more dove hunting opportunities in the public hunting program, TPWD in 1994 used some of the funds generated through APH purchases to pay for short-term leases of 10 tracts of private property agency biologists had located and identified as having good potential for dove hunting.
Keeps growing
The program was such a success that the agency expanded it the next year, and it has continued to grow. This year’s program has the largest number of these dove/small game units in the program’s history.
“We concentrate on getting (dove/small game) leases within range of hunters in metropolitan areas,” Edmiston said. “The goal is to give hunters opportunities they can access close to home.”
Not all of the tracts are close to urban areas. But many are. The mix of properties included in the public hunting program include several of TPWD’s wildlife management areas, portions of federally controlled national forests, lands held by other government entities as well as large tracts of privately owned timberlands cooperating forest products companies lease to the agency.
Hunters willing to put in the time and effort can find very high quality, even world-class, hunting for some game animals and game birds on the tracts. White-tailed deer, the states most popular game animals, are a major focus of many hunters buying an APH permit and participating in the program. But a large percentage of participants focus on the game bird opportunities, especially waterfowl but also doves, quail and even turkey available on the public hunting lands.
“A place to deer hunting is what a lot of people are looking for when they by an APH, and we have a lot of really good deer hunting opportunities,” Edmiston said. “But it’s really surprising how many APH holders are interested in bird hunting.”
And that popularity goes beyond the dove/ small game tracts, he said. Some of the properties in the program produce outstanding waterfowling, and some of the state WMAs available to APH holders offer what can be productive quail hunting.
Purchasers of the $48 APH permit, which became available Aug. 15, receive a 182-page booklet that includes maps of the 180-plus tracts in the program with each listing the game species that can be hunted on the tracts, dates those hunts are allowed and regulations specific to those tracts. A digital version of the booklet, as well as detailed information on the public hunting program, is also available online at TPWD’s website, tpwd.texas.gov.
This year’s annual public hunting program includes several changes to previous rules governing portions of the program, Edmiston said.
“There were some changes made to improve opportunities for APH holders and make hunts more fair and safe for participants,” he said.
Under the new rules, persons wishing to apply for what the program calls “e-postcard” hunts will have to hold an APH before applying for drawing to pick participants. These e-postcard hunts, with applications submitted online, are held on TPWD properties and include limited numbers of participants for hunts for waterfowl, deer and other game. The hunts were created as a kind of “bonus” for APH holders. There is no application fee or hunt fee for these permits.
Until this year, there was no requirement that an applicant actually hold an APH before applying. This resulted in large numbers of applications and a high number of those selected for permits not showing up to use them.
Better to wait
To address that, TPWD delayed the start of accepting applications for the e-postcard hunts until Aug. 15, the date 2018-19 annual public hunting permits go on sale. The online application for these hunts will require the applicant possess a current APH, a requirement TPWD’s online system can immediately verify. The e-postcard hunts will continue to have no application fee or hunt fee.
Similarly, the annual online application period for a drawing to issue the limited number of permits to take antlerless deer on U.S. Forest Service properties in the public hunting program has been delayed from its previous July start. Online applications for “doe tag” drawing began being accepted Aug. 15 with a deadline of Sept. 15. There is no application fee, but only holders of a 201819 APH permit will be allowed to apply for the drawing.
To address issues that have arisen around two of the public hunting program’s most popular coastal waterfowl hunting areas, TPWD is changing rules governing the order in which hunters on those areas chose their hunting locations.
Beginning this season, hunters on the 15,600-acre Justin Hurst WMA near Freeport and 7,200-acre Mad Island WMA in Matagorda County will no longer pick their hunting locations in the order in which they arrive at the site’s gates.
Instead of the longstanding first-come/firstserved format that saw some hunters line up at the gate days in advance of hunts to secure preferred hunting sites, the new format will see WMA staff each morning, beginning about 4 a.m., hand out numbered tags to hunters lined up in vehicles outside the area’s gates. At 4:30 a.m., a random drawing of those numbers will determine the order in which hunters choose their designated hunting site.
The move comes as a way to more fairly allocate hunting sites on the areas. Some sites — specific ponds or sites on large wetland units — are traditionally more productive and sought-after than others. The first-come/ first-served format meant hunters who were not able to spend the night (and sometimes, days) in line ahead of a hunt never had a chance to hunt some of the area’s most productive sites.
The random drawing to pick the order of choosing hunting sites at Hurst and Mad Island WMA also stands to reduce the number of hunters spending the night lined up in vehicles parked on the road shoulder outside the area’s gate. That practice has created safety concerns as well as instances of littering and other problematic behavior.
“Those changes are designed to make it fairer and safer for everyone,” Edmiston said.