Early Season with Paradise Adventures

Located in SE Kansas near Altoona, Paradise Adventures sits on approximately 13,000 acres of privately owned property in game units 11 &12. Their varying properties offer a little bit of everything - from river and creek bottom travel routes that span along field and pasture edges to large wooded lots surrounded by fields and large native grass pastures with oak filled draws. The entire area is full of big bucks.

Brandon Nunnenkamp's been busy getting ready for the upcoming season, but he took some time out to walk us through what's going on in his neck of the woods.

Our early season scouting and success comes from years of learning to move and adapt with the changing fall food sources. Our game camera  scouting begins in the early to mid summer as the corn tassels and ears grow.  We focus on these green corn fields first, placing our cameras and trying to locate what trails the deer are comfortable using to enter and leave. This is important because when these corn fields get harvested at season open in mid-September, we will already know the travel routes in and out of the fields that these big Kansas bucks prefer.

The one thing that changes their patterns from year to year are the rotation of crops planted or not planted in the fields. If a field is planted to corn this year it will usually be beans next year or there is a possibility for some reason it just doesn’t get planted. The movement has been somewhat slower during daylights this year due to the extreme heat we have experienced.

As September rolls on and our deer seasons start to open (with youth in early September, muzzleloader and archery in mid-September), the corn has started to turn brown and our focus shifts to the lush green soybean fields, which becomes the main food sources.

At this point you must be flexible and follow the food. Some soybean fields will start to mature with leaves turning yellow and dropping. Once this starts to happen, the deer will switch back to the ripened corn fields that we’ve previously scouted.

We also like to focus on the small, isolated tree lots. Sometimes early season the big bucks just aren’t as social as they are later in the year. They have their little bachelor group they run with and that’s it. That small one acre patch of timber doesn’t look like much on the map, but more often than not early season cameras will tell a different story in those small patches of timber.