Hunting Tips

To find public waterfowl hunting land in Kansas, start with Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area near Great Bend and Quivira National Wildlife Refuge near Stafford. Cheyenne Bottoms sits inside a 41,000-acre wetland basin, and the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks (KDWP) manages 19,857 acres of it.

To find public waterfowl hunting land in Texas, start with the coastal marsh Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) managed by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD). The standout is J.D. Murphree WMA near Port Arthur, a 25,852-acre mix of fresh, intermediate, and brackish marsh that hunters reach by boat.

HuntWise vs onX is one of the most common matchups hunters search, and the two apps are built around different strengths. Both show property lines on satellite and topo maps, and both draw on county parcel records.

Rhode Island abolished county government before any other state, back in 1842, more than a century before Connecticut followed the same path. HuntWise's Land Ownership layer, RIDEM's management area maps, and each city or town's own records fill in for the county office that hasn't existed here for nearly 200 years.

Massachusetts splits its record-keeping down the middle: five of its fourteen counties still run county government, while the other eight handle everything, including land records, at the city or town level.

Delaware's hunting trespass rule doesn't wait for a landowner to post anything: entering private land with a gun, dog, or trap to hunt without permission is its own specific offense under state law, posted or not.

Finding property lines for hunting in Connecticut means checking HuntWise's Land Ownership layer against your town's land records, since the state has no county government to check instead, then confirming the boundary against CT DEEP's public hunting area maps.

Finding property lines for hunting in New Jersey means checking HuntWise's Land Ownership layer against your county's tax and deed records, then confirming the boundary against NJDEP Fish & Wildlife's Wildlife Management Area maps, since public and private ground sit close together almost everywhere in the state.

Vermont's constitution has guaranteed the right to hunt, fish, and trap on open private land since 1793, so the property-line question here is really a posting question: has this specific tract been legally closed, and if so, how?

Finding property lines for hunting in New Hampshire means checking three things at once: HuntWise's Land Ownership layer, NHFG's public land maps, and whether a tract has actually been posted, since state law treats unposted land as open to hunters by default.

Maine flips the private-land assumption most states rely on: if a parcel isn't posted with a sign or paint mark, state law treats it as open to enter, not the other way around. Confirming who owns a tract, and whether they've actually closed it, matters more here than spotting a fence line.

Hawaii's property-line question splits in two directions at once: the state's four counties handle parcel and tax records like anywhere else, but none of them record deeds. Every deed, lease, and easement on any island files with a single state office instead, the Bureau of Conveyances in Honolulu.