Maybe they were like :scared:

 

Yea, but where?

 

Which way did you go up?? I know the Des Moines area and the Quad Cities area are hotspots. Waterways, etc., anything with trees or CRP is where they're hanging out in my thinking.

 

I graduated from high school in Central Iowa, when there were zero deer in my county. Pheasants were getting hard to come by, and there wasn't even much cover left for a rabbit. I attended my 20 year reunion, and all I heard about were the deer. Pretty hard for me to believe too. But the deer have adjusted to man, and live in the weeds, tall grass, and corn.

They also make long migrations from the river bottoms, where they Winter, to spread across the state. Stayed at a friends house last Spring, and he had deer on a tiny food plot all day. Almost never looked at it without seeing a deer. Last Fall he arrowed a 17 pointer off that food plot, which was across an open pasture, 100 yards behind his house. Another friend hunts near Red Rock Resevior. Says his hunting party made one drive, and spent the remainder of the day dragging out about a dozen bucks.

I remember visiting my in-laws over the years. At first there were no deer... then a few... next thing I knew they we infested. I can't explain why, it just happened, and like Iowa beef, those deer are big fat guys. Defies logic though, cause it sure doesn't look like what we think of as deer habitat.

Here is one explaination: If you were to hunt in Iowa, where would you hunt? Almost all the woods in Missouri get hunted, and a good portion of the deer get harvested because of it. Well, in Iowa the deer leave the woods, and hide in standing corn and weeds. So, they live and breed, cuz all the standing corn and weeds don't get hunted.

 

Once the Missouri gun season opens, all the deer flood to Iowa and huntin' gets good up here.

Seriously though, any place up here that has even a slight amount of brush is probably holding a deer or two. I don't spend much time hunting large timber blocks up here (when I can even find one), because the fence lines and brushy draws are where all the action is. It works to their advantage too, since the kind of deer that hang out in the open don't have people making 200+ yards shots at 'em.

 

Originally posted by Heeler75
Which way did you go up?? I know the Des Moines area and the Quad Cities area are hotspots. Waterways, etc., anything with trees or CRP is where they're hanging out in my thinking.

I went up hiway 27 to Cedar Rapids then NE to Debeque(sp) into Wisconsin. The farther north you went the less cover you could see. This was my frist trip across IA and it was not what I expected.

 

Lots of times they hide in plain sight. For as big as they are, it doesn't take a whole lot to hide 'em especially when they lie still. I remember one time here by the house, I was driving down the road not a 1/4 mile from the house and its on a blacktop road, was driving along and just happened to look over to the side of the road and not 20 feet off the road lay a pretty nice buck tucked up under a cedar tree. I was going fairly slow at the time and just kept on going. Got up the road a ways, turned around and drove back to the house, got the camera and came back. Sure enough he was still lying there, and I took the pic but there was enough grass and weeds in the way that he was hard to pick out in the pic. He never did get up, at least while I was there but I wasn't there very long maybe 20 seconds or so. Now granted the terrain down here in SW MO is nothing like Iowa but it just shows how they can hide if they choose to.

 

It's got to do with good soil. Iowa grows bigger beef, turkey, deer, corn, soybeans... Missouri has great pheasant cover, but few birds. Would you believe that quail have made a come back in Iowa!!! We talk about deer nutritional needs, and deer have met them on some of the best soil on Earth... Iowa. That, and it is impossible to harvest most of the bucks, because they are in standing corn on private land. But, I think it all boils down to good soil.

 

First time and even now I'm amazed at the deer hunting in Iowa even though I feel like I'm hunting rabbits instead of deer due to the cover. Those deer just run around everywhere up there and hop from brush patch to brush patch.

The farm we hunt up there has a 10 acre patch of cedars on it and we just hunt the perimeter and wait for the deer to come and go from it. It really gets nuts when the neighbors start driving off there surrounding farms. One time we had a heard of nearly 40 deer come running by us when the neighbors drove the farm off. We watched from the distance and it looked like a bunch of ants coming down the hillside, but it was all deer. We got setup and waited and got shots off at two nice bucks, but didn't get either one because they were hauling the mail!

There's some really good public hunting land nearby also that we just never had the need to hunt, but it's always loaded with sign and you see deer all over it if you drive by in the evenings.