Former Iolan Mike Wilmoth is featured in the winter 2019 issue of Pheasants Forever magazine.
Wilmoth, 60, and a 1976 graduate of Iola High School who now lives in Wellington, grew to love hunting on his grandfather Avery Wilmoths farm.
The magazine article expands on his outdoors beginnings:
There was no great mystery to it, no bird dogs or pickups trucks. Wilmoth simply strolled first with a BB gun, later a break-action .410 following his dad and granddad along the farms hedgerows busting quail. Easy peasy.
For 12 years, from age 22 to 34, the born hunter stopped hunting. His attention had turned toward his two young children, his time toward the multiple jobs he worked to support them teaching, coaching, officiating football in fall and scooping grain come spring. (Six years ago he worked as a replacement head linesman referee in an NFL game.)
I really missed being in the field, Wilmoth says. But theres only so many things you can fit in a day.
When Wilmoths son Brandon was in grade school, the itch, as he calls it, took hold Brandon wanted to get into some birds. So Wilmoth led his boy on a quarter-mile pheasant walk. They flushed a single rooster and missed. Brandon was hooked. Around the same time, Wilmoths wife, perhaps sensing the moment, gave her husband a brand-new Remington 870.
One perfectly timed gesture and a son itching to follow in his old mans footsteps. Thats all it took.
Some 25 years later, Wilmoth doesnt miss a pheasant season. Every fall hes knee-deep in Kansas prairie grass, out there with Brandon or a former student strolling, hunting, right where he should be.
In a phone interview with the Register, Wilmoth said his love of hunting led him and a friend to start a Pheasants Forever chapter in Wellington about three years ago.
His son Brandon now works full-time for the organization, whose purpose is to improve conservation and habitat for pheasants, quail and other wildlife.
Pheasant hunting is Wilmoths favorite I dont have the patience for deer and he hunts primarily within 10 miles of Wellington. We do go out to western Kansas a few times a year and about every four or five years we hunt in South Dakota, long a hotbed of the shooting sport, Wilmoth said.
Pheasants arent native to the United States. The first were imported in the 1770s. By the 1880s hardier varieties had established themselves in the Pacific Northwest. From then until the 1900s they were imported in increasing numbers from English game-bird farms and today are a fixture in about 40 states. Kansas is a destination for many pheasant hunters, and when the season opens each year towns in western Kansas make a point of welcoming hunters with community events, often the night before opening day.
Im blessed to live in a place that my family enjoys, and is home to good pheasant hunting, Wilmoth said.
Wilmoth teaches history at Wellington High School and is an adjunct instructor at Cowley County Community College.
His parents, Don and Kathryn, have been fixtures in Iola for years. Don retired in 1995 after 19 years as principal of Iola Middle School.
