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TPWD Drawn Hunts: How To Hunt Private Property And Public Land In Texas For Free
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May 22, 2024
This video is about how to use Texas Drawn Hunts to win a hunting permit for restricted land in Texas. Every year, Texas Parks and Wildlife launches their Texas Drawn Hunts program, which is a series of lottery drawings to win hunting permits for everything from deer to ducks, gators to bighorn sheep, dove, turkey and more. They are available for all kinds of properties ranging from state parks to wildlife management areas, state and national forests, and even private land. Start your hunting adventure here: https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/hunt/public/public_hunt_drawing/ In this video: 0:00 - What are Texas Drawn Hunts? 0:50 - How to apply for Texas Drawn Hunts 2:10 - Comparing hunting properties 8:32 - How to apply for a hunt 7:00 - It's a weighted lottery 8:19 - How I won and lost a drawn hunt 11:00 - E-Postcard hunt drawings 11:44 - Big Time hunts
View Video Transcript
0:00
Hey everybody, it's Simon from Lake Up. It's summertime, but I'm in a hunting mood because it's time to plan for all of our public hunting opportunities on the lake, off the lake, and beyond
0:13
In Texas, the best public hunting opportunities are through Texas drawn huts. Now, what Texas drawn hunts are, are basically a bunch of different lotteries going on all at the same time. It might be free to enter. It might be free to enter. It might be
0:29
$3 upwards of $10 for the big time months is what they call them big time you know kind of big
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game high fence type hunts there's a lot of different opportunities for public hunting so how do you
0:44
apply for a Texas drawn hunt you do it through the website so I'm going to go back and forth
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between my screen camera and show you exactly how to use the Texas drawn hunt system
1:00
You go to the website, I'll put the link down below in the description, and you hit this big green button, apply for hunts
1:07
I'm going to go to browse the hunt catalog. And here, right here by area, this is the best place to start
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This map is a new feature for the Texas Drawn Hunt system
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This makes things so much easier. It took hours of planning before
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to be able to achieve what I can now achieve by just looking at this map
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This map is totally awesome. I cannot describe how awesome this map is and how useful it is
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So what I like to do is go by category because I'm going to start with what species I'm going to pursue, right
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So let's just say I'm going to go with archery deer, just for example
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Okay, so here we see it filters all of the locations that there are
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drawings to hunt archery deer on. So I'm going to say, you know what? I kind of like East Texas
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I'm going to zoom in a little bit, double click or zoom in. And what do we have here? Fort Boggy
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State Park. State parks are pretty cool. Wildlife management areas. So I'm going to open each of these
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into a new tab. And we'll compare them. I'll pick one. Okay, so we have Gus Engling and
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then we have Fort Boggy. Okay. First thing I'm going to look at is the application deadline
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I haven't missed it, have I? And in this case, no, I have not. Use of ATVs is allowed
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If that's your style, then that's something to be concerned about. On this one, ATVs are prohibited, right
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The other thing I look at is, when is the hunt? Can I make it? This is opening weekend of rifle season
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And so, eh, I don't know. know if I want to miss that. Now this one's in late October. I think I might. So so far I'm
3:08
leaning towards gut singling. Yeah, you can apply for both, but I'm just leaning towards one
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or the other This one got a fee Fort Boggy State Park I noticed that all the state parks have fees but if you ever been to a state park and you see how tussile the wildlife is and how abundant they are and just unpressured
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it would be so awesome, so awesome to hunt in the state park
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So I would gladly pay that $130 if I was selected to hunt the state park
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That would just be so cool. okay uh the other thing i like to look at is down here in the bottom last year we've got some
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data on last year now if this if this uh if there was not an archery hunt available on this property
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last year there won't be any data here um for instance we've got 529 applications how many
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how many groups the success rate we've got some missing data here for fort bogies so
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um that doesn't give me a lot to go on now um these numbers the success rate a little
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11% that's not amazing compared to other properties that I've seen on here but you know it's
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something it's better than no data right so we've got 500 applications here we've got 698 here we have 60
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available so you have about a 1 in 10 chance um unweighted and same here you've got about a 1 in 10 right
4:35
no that's not right you've got about a 1% chance okay i'm out i'm out on a 1% chance
4:43
I'm going to apply this to this one right here. So we've got 60 permits
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That's a lot of people. It's compartment hunting, which means that you're going to have a designated area to hunt
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So that's a little bit safer. You know, you still have a fee here
5:01
You're going to have a fee. But, you know, a one in ten chance of success might be worth it to you, right
5:10
And then you've got all of these specifications. So you can take one deer. You've got the inside spread rule on the bucks, right
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So a buck, a spike, or a dough, one deer. And you've got four days, five days to do it
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So I like this. I'm going to apply to this. And that's how you pick
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Now, you've got, sometimes you have different dates. You'll have three or four different weeks that they're going to be running this thing
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And so you kind of have a first, second, third choice of dates
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And I'm not sure how that shakes out. That just depends on who gets drawn and so forth
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If you're taking, you know, say a friend or a child with you
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you'd add your applicant here. If you want to show the details again, just to be clear
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you can do that. I'm going to add this to cart. And number of applicants is one
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Oh, I got to add myself. So this is where you add your personal information, which I'm not going to do on camera because I value privacy
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But you get the idea. It's a typical checkout process. So once I add myself, add it to cart, you can check out a bunch of hunts at the same time, which is usually what I do
6:30
You can also go to let me see if I can find it here go to the main menu I can check my status You go to check your status same thing you put in your personal information I usually just use my driver license number because I have that memorized and I don like putting my social online
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So that's what I use to check it. Last name, date of birth, driver's license, that's all you need
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You do a search. You click on your name. And then it has every application you've ever done
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It also keeps track of how many times you've applied to one category
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category. So, for instance, archery deer, this is going to be my first time applying for archery deer
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But I know that I've done pretty much all of the gun deer categories several times over
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And what it does is it'll give you more chances. Every year you apply for these things, it'll give
7:24
you more chances the next year. So you're kind of racking up points and it's a weighted lottery
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So it's going to give better chances to the people who have been applying faithful year after year
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rather than just a random lottery every single year. So you do want to pay attention to the ones that you've applied to in the past
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So the first place that I go, just to back up a little bit, is I do go to check my status, figure out which ones I've applied for in the past
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And then I go through, find the properties I want to pick within those categories
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check out all at once and I'm done. I do that in the beginning of August and I'm good for the rest of the year
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Now, I want to tell you, I've won one of these drawn hunts and I've lost one of these drawn hunts
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because what I found out the hard way is how they notify the winners is by email
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Now the email does not come from TpWD.Gotexas.gov. It comes from TXFG Sales.com
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And the person that I talked to at Texas Parks in Wildlife
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said to me, yeah, usually those go to junk mail and people miss them
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Usually. That was the word that was used. I still have to take a deep breath when I think about that
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Because sure enough, it went to junk mail and after 10 days of no response, they redraw
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And you lose your points. So, I totally won and totally lost a drawing hunt
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I still, I still, my blood pressure kind of gets a little spike there, but we got to take it easy
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This is hunting. This is fun. We're having fun here. So learn from my pain
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Learn from my mistake. Learn from my pain. What I found out was that the drawings happen two to three days-ish, is what I was told
9:39
after the application deadline. So a few business days after the application deadline is when the drawing happens
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And then everybody's notified, then they have 10 days to respond. So mark your calendars
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I would say 10 days after the drawing make a mark on your calendar just to be sure that you hit in that sweet spot of you already been notified but it hasn lapsed yet
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10 days after each, they're going to be different times. I mean, depending on the species, archery is going to be, is going to close earlier
10:17
You know, alligator, froghorn are going to close earlier. Turkey is going to close later
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You know, spring turkey is going to close later. So all these deadlines are going to be for the drawings, they're staggered and they're going to be at different times
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So just make sure you mark a calendar for 10 days after it closes and don't even bother checking your email
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You just go here and check your status. You can see your status on every single drawing. It hasn't been drawn yet or it was drawn and you lost or it was drawn and you won or in my case you won and then it was lapsed and redrawn
10:52
And so that reminder is just going to be in there forever for me, which is great. So that's how you don't miss out on a hunt if you happen to win
11:03
There are also these e-postcards too. So there's the regular kind of regular drawn hunts
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which are all, I think they're, I think they're all $3, just the regular ones
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Then there's the e-postcard ones, which are, it's obviously like a legacy system
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that used to actually send in a postcard and all that kind of stuff. now they're e-postcards and those are free so you might as well go for those right because they're
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free they also have a lot of applicants and a lot of those are going to be a walk-on situation so you
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might run into a lot of other folks while you're out in the field if you do happen to win one of
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those then you have the big time hunts and those are a lot of times private land guided hunts
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high fence, high dollar hunts, something that would normally be thousands of dollars or, you know
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maybe even $10,000 or more, you can actually win that with a $10 application
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I don't personally do those because you could rack up $100 pretty quick
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And I'm just not in the mood, gamble $100. I'll gamble like $20 on six or seven hunts
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And I do that faithfully every year. and it actually worked. So that's my personal strategy
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You do whatever's right for you. I think it's pretty cool that these are all available
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So with Texas drawn hunts, you can hunt, state parks, wildlife management areas, state forests
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I believe national forests. I believe national forests like Davy Crockett. What else
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Private property? There are private. private land dove hunts on here. Really cool
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A lot of variety, lots of different ways to be able to get into properties you cannot otherwise get into
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We all know that Texas has a lot of private land and it's just hard to hunt if you don't have land
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So I'm really thankful that Parks and Wildlife provides this program and just wanted to make sure that you know how to use it, use it properly and take advantage of it
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get outside and we will see you out there
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