Kansas official outlines regional deer trends, control permit rules and barriers to harvest

Levi Jaster, big game program research coordinator for the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, told a legislative committee that Kansas faces contrasting deer conditions: abundant white‑tailed deer in the east and low or declining mule deer and whitetails in parts of western Kansas.

“Today, we're looking at, you know, declines in Western Kansas... and, as a biologist we'd call overabundance in Eastern Kansas,” Jaster said, summarizing regional differences and noting that habitat and precipitation drive much of the variation.

Jaster described the department's monitoring methods, including roughly 2,500 miles of ground transects used for distance‑analysis surveys conducted in October and November and a framework of 18 deer management units. He said the agency sends about 43,000 post‑season surveys to hunters each year and typically receives 10,000 to 15,000 responses; those voluntary surveys…