I personally get real tired of hearing about way too many deer in SE Iowa. I live and work in SE Iowa and drive 60 plus miles each day through Davis, Wapello, Jefferson, and Van Buren counties on highways, blacktop and gravel roads. I live next to a large public hunting area and I will tell you that I see very few deer. I leave for work at 7AM and drive home at 5;30 PM and haven't seen a deer since Christmas Eve. My Brother-in Law lives in Van Buren county near Douds and we did see 6 or 7 deer on Christmas Eve going over there but in years past we would see 60 or 70 deer on the same 15 mile trip. The few deer we did see were near a standing corn food patch left by a farmer/outfitter and that was it. I haven't hunted this year because I had prostrate surgery before Thanksgiving, but I have talked to hunters and keep an eye on the State ground that borders my land and those guys have seen almost nothing. I talked to a guy and his son, whose Mother used to be my neighbor, who has hunted most of this ground for as long as I have and they did admit to missing a couple of shots. This was on the last Sunday of the 2nd shotgun season about 2:00pm and they had not killed a deer, and had seen very few at all, despite hunting both weekends and 2 days besides.
I certainly am not calling any one a liar, but those who claim to see 80 or 100 deer in a field each and every night, I feel must be exaggerating some. I am all over the place down here at all times of day and I honestly have never seen that. Those 80 deer could also be every deer in 5 or 6 square miles, depending on food sources. Since the snow last weekend there have been 3 or 4 deer tracks crossing my yard and lane where there used to be a dozen or more. All in all, just like I have been harping about for several years now, the deer population around here is WAY DOWN and bound to drop even more as hunters come down to SE Iowa to HELP us with our over population problems and so that they can shot does with a rifle from 200 yards away just because it is NEAT to do that.
I also read that all the farmers down here want as many deer killed as possible because they are eating all their corn. Right now I believe that there are probably fewer deer than we had 10 or 15 years ago and even though we still heard about crop damage then it wasn't the out cry that it is now. I know that deer can eat a fair amount of corn, but as we also know they must eat other forage because they can't digest a strict diet of corn. I think that the crop damage problem stems more from $5.60 a bushel corn vs $3.00 a bushel corn like it was 15 years ago. Plus with the much higher yields now the deer are actually eating a smaller percentage of the total crop than they were 15 years ago when no one was screaming to kill every doe in sight. I am not saying that farmers aren't entitled to make a profit, but that they aren't entitled to pressure the DNR and others to over harvest our deer herd just to increase that profit, which is a big part of what has been happening for a few years.
