Deer Hunting

I have just returned from another visit to my daughter in Iowa. We tend to hurry and get in as many visits as we can before it begins to snow. For a country girl from the south the snows of Iowa are more than a little intimidating.

This trip coincided with the beginning of deer season. Now I grew up with hunting seasons in Kentucky so the rush to the woods at the beginning of deer season wasn't anything really new to me. However, deer hunting in Iowa is a little different. For one thing all the rules favor the deer. Most of the season is strictly for bow hunting. After a week or so of bow hunting there is a week that you can hunt with a shotgun and slugs. Then back to bow hunting. In Kentucky you hunt with rifles that could bring down a buck two counties away but with a shotgun you have to be close enough for "howdy-do's" before you shoot. To make it more challenging you have the sparsity of cover in Iowa. They have lots of open, flat cornfields but relatively few wooded areas. It's hard to hide and sneak up on a deer in a picked corn field. They also limit the number of hunters by making it a lottery to get a permit. In short, the deer are definitely given the edge.

You'd think that this was because they needed to protect a limited population of deer. Far from it! The truth is that there are deer everywhere. Lots of grain and wide open spaces have created a haven for deer. We never left the house that we didn't see deer...in fields, crossing the roads, in the yards in town, behind the school, walking down the road. Driving becomes a defensive art to keep from hitting the deer as they wander back and forth. In fact, we looked up from breakfast one morning to see an eight-point buck leisurely walk by the window on his way to the woods across the road.

It seems the only people not seeing deer were the hunters.