Where to Hunt

Permits, not first-come lines, decide who hunts Ohio's Lake Erie marshes, so the first step to find public waterfowl hunting land in Ohio is learning the lottery.

The most direct way to find public waterfowl hunting land in Iowa is to focus on the state's managed marshes, and Riverton Wildlife Area in the Missouri River bottoms is a popular place to begin. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources (Iowa DNR) manages more than 410,000 acres of Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) that stay open to the public year-round.

One boundary decides whether a duck hunt at Horicon Marsh is legal: the line between the state wildlife area and the federal refuge. To find public waterfowl hunting land in Wisconsin at its most widely known marsh, you need to know which side of that line you're on.

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?