17 December 2007
Iowa Deer - Day 4
Posted by Darrell under: Hunting Stories .
The deer are getting smarter. They aren’t falling for our bag of tricks anymore. They are starting to take different escape routes and if they would have ran North yesterday, they are running South today.
There wasn’t much shooting today. We saw lots of deer, but anything shootable was making sure we didn’t get a shot. I, again, had a decent buck close to me. This one cruised by at about 30 yards at the tale end of a drive through the ‘Ranch Timber’. I, again, passed.
Dana had his own ‘passed’ story for the day. He jumped the big boy, a massive 12 pointer while doing a drive with me through the ‘South Timber’. It stopped about 30 yards from him and all he could see was it’s butt and it’s horns. Dana decided that an animal that huge deserved a sure shot. He decided to only shoot if it showed him its side. It never did and he never shot. He watched the buck of a lifetime trot off. It was definitely the responsible thing to do. I’m not sure I would have had the fortitude to do it. If I had my own tag, I’d have probably pulled the trigger. Of course, if I had wounded that deer and not recovered it, I’d have had a hard time walking back out into the field with my gun.
I had another good day hunting with Dana, Mike, and Chris. I spent part of the day riding around with Mike in his huge 1 ton pickup and learned a lot more about how the farming business works in Iowa. I’ve always had a lot of respect for farmers. After spending the last several days with some, I have even more respect. These guys work hard, play hard, and generally just enjoy life. They spend the lion’s share of their time in the great outdoors. They know where the deer are going to be and where they are going to run because they see them every single day of their lives. Pretty cool.
Hunting Iowa is so much different from any other hunting I’ve ever done. You can literally see for miles and miles. Chris and I were standing up on the ‘West Flat’ and he pointed out 4 different towns in the distance. One was about 30 miles away. The deer run for miles, too. I don’t know how many times I watched deer jump and then run completely through one section and into the next. A section is a mile long. These deer love to run.
In Missouri, a group of hunters can spend weeks hunting the same 500 acres. In Iowa, we can hunt 500 acres in less than an hour. The locals can tell you where you’ll jump the deer and where they’ll run to. The trick is getting there ahead of them and ambushing them for a shot. It is a lot of fun!
Today, we didn’t kill anything. We didn’t wound anything either – which is good! We saw a whopping 53 deer today on a total of 9 drives. Ten of those deer were bucks. Three were big boys or ‘Wall Hangars’ as the locals call them. When a local says a deer is a ‘Wall Hanger’ you’d better believe it’s a big buck. One of the locals described a ‘Wall Hanger’ as a buck that when you lay him in the back of your pickup, you can see his tines sticking up out of the pickup bed.
The total for the 4 days so far is 168 deer and 49 bucks. Maybe tomorrow is the day for someone to take a ‘Wall Hanger’.
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