Thanks for the post about the population numbers. I do believe that either that info is very old or some one deliberately published bad info to further a personal agenda, such as perhaps more NR licenses. With the info in the trends and harvest link, if you study it a little you will see that for the last year posted, 2006, that there were only 150,552 tags filled out of 377525 issued. That means that there were 226,973 tags, over 60%, that went unfilled, and that was just the issued tags, which says nothing about the many thousands of doe tags that went unsold. If in fact, we do have 350,000 to 400,000 deer in Iowa, are we just very poor deer hunters to only have a 40% success ratio? The one graph on the DNR site shows a simulated line of just about 300,000 population for 2006 but with a very steep decline from 2004 and 2005. As I have said, I personally believe that the deer population is way down state wide, even though I do believe some of you, that point out certain areas with large populations. With seasons running from September 15th to January 25th and legal weapons stopping just short of explosives and bazookas, I can only rationalize 4 reasons to leave a purchased tag unfilled. #1 Lazy Hunter #2 Lack of Access #3 Overly selective Hunter and #4 LACK OF DEER SIGHTINGS.
I believe that most tags go unfilled because of lack of deer!!
