Kansas’ deer-hunting architect

Lee Queal cracked a slight smile as he slowly climbed from a pit blind and handed his rifle to Lauren Sill, his daughter and longtime hunting partner. At 82, with “legs that don’t want to work,” it was the end of his Kansas deer hunting career. Months earlier, he decided this was his last season to carry his .270 afield.

“I can’t complain. I can’t complain at all,” said the retired biologist from Pratt.

The architect of Kansas’ first deer seasons, he can largely thank himself for so many great memories.

“They hired me in 1963 and said they had a target date of 1965 for Kansas’ first deer season,” said Queal. “It was my job to put together a concept that would work for us here in Kansas.” His initial plans are mostly working all these years later.

“A lot of what Lee did has remained consistent over the years,” said Keith Sexson, Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism assistant secretary. “His management units have stayed about the same. His ideas about how to control the deer populations was kind of ahead of the game, too.”

Planning ahead

Queal had just finished his masters degree, with quite a bit of background in deer research, when the Kansas Forestry, Fish and Game offered him the job of being the Kansas big-game biologist. He found it easy to get public opinion on the subject of deer in Kansas.

“Some people were very eager to have a season, like (Kansas) hunters who had deer hunted in other states,” said Queal. “Some were less so, including some landowners, but many thought we needed to start something to deal with crop damage.” Others were worried because Kansas was up to 300 to 400 deer vehicle collisions across the state.

One of his first decisions was to divide the state in to several management units, so the agency could manage different habitats and populations to what best served those areas.

“At the time states like Michigan had a one-size-fits-all approach, but there’s a lot of difference between southern and northern Michigan,” said Queal. “It just didn’t make sense to me to have a season based on the entire state when there were so many differences in Kansas.”

It took some courage, he admits, to also start the state with what was then possibly the most controversial thing in deer management – shooting whitetail does.

“For years we’d had such a problem with under harvest of deer in Michigan, and then a lot of winter kill when populations got too high,” said Queal. “It was also so hard to get a doe harvest going if a state had been buck only for years. We knew the limiting factors in Kansas would be sociological and not biological, but that landowners would only put up with so much so we got some kind of doe harvest started with that first deer season in 1965.”

Another interesting thing that went against the national grain, was to have the firearms deer season after the rut when bucks are the most vulnerable. Unlike what some now think, Queal said it had little to do with allowing trophy animals a chance to breed.

“We wanted to be cautious because in some areas the population was spread out pretty thin,” said Queal. “If we held the season before or during the rut, we might have left too many does unbred.”

Queal set up the framework, including the number of permits per unit, but wasn’t actually the state’s deer biologist when that first season began in 1965. The summer before, he took another job in Michigan, but returned to Kansas in 1968 to man several jobs within the wildlife division. Queal said he’s pleased with how things progressed with the state’s herd and hunting opportunities.

Looking back

“I had no idea the populations would be allowed to get as high as they did. We’ve gone from 300 or 400 car kills to more than 10,000 some years,” he said. “Kansas landowners have been just remarkably tolerant.”

The concepts of being able to offer residents unlimited firearms permits, for them to be able kill up to five or six antlerless whitetails in some areas annually, and today’s hordes of non-resident deer hunters were also unexpected.

He’s hunted Kansas deer most of those seasons and most have been with his daughter.

“She’s a better hunter than I am, though I’m probably a better shot,” he said as he watched her head into the sandhills the second afternoon of the season. “Well, I used to be a better shot, anyway. She is an excellent guide, though. She takes really good care of me.”

She was nearby when late in the morning on the Dec. 2 opening day, Queal saw a big-antlered buck headed his way.

“I knew I wanted to shoot it when I first saw it, but when it got closer I could see it was really limping,” he said, adding he didn’t think the buck would survive much longer and might be suffering. “It wasn’t an ideal situation but I knew I had to shoot it. It was the right thing to do.”

Sill later said she was proud of her dad for killing the animal, and that it seemed appropriate for it to be his last since he’d spend years preaching the importance of respect for all aspects of hunting, especially the wildlife.

The next night Queal sat one last time, rifle across his lap and hoped to possibly shoot a doe with the Winchester Model 70 he has used to hunt deer since the mid-1950s. No does came by his blind during that last hunt.

In the final minutes of the hunt, he talked of all he’d gotten from Kansas deer hunting. When asked if he realized how many thousands of people had done the same, based largely on his season frameworks set so long ago, he smiled.

“It’s been a phenomenal run,” he said. “It’s hard to believe how good things have been. We’d have never guessed back then.”

This story was originally published December 12, 2015 at 5:19 PM with the headline "Kansas’ deer-hunting architect."