The Non-Traditionalist’s Guide To Whitetail Shotgun Season

The Non-Traditionalist’s Guide To Whitetail Shotgun Season

By Kent Boucher

I often tell people summer is my fourth favorite season. By nature I am an “against the flow” kind of person so I gain amusement from my audience’s surprised reaction to such a statement. As a teacher summer certainly brings much appreciated rest from 60-70 hour work weeks, as well as the freedom to travel and fish everything from farm ponds to trout streams all around our beautiful state. But there are three reasons why summer is not my favorite season: 1) Heat- Iowa can begin to feel like life on a Cajun bayou when the high 90s settle in with the humidity boiling in the 90th percentile. 2) As vibrant as the mid-August, green-colored canvas around the Iowa countryside is, the colors of harvest-time in America’s grocery store are distinctively magnificent. And 3) Deer season.

Once whitetail hunting gets in your brain, you can’t shake it. I have tried to determine why deer hunting is so incredibly captivating. I’m sure there are many reasons for this, but I hypothesize that the primal nature of hunting big game is the foremost allure that draws hunters back year after year. Even though we have a limitless number of modern “tools” we can use while hunting, you still can’t escape the ancient reality of how difficult it is to consistently locate, shoot, track, and field dress a large animal. Furthermore, hunting requires us to step onto the same playing field as wild animals and truly carve out a temporary niche for ourselves within the ecosystem. We have to operate on their schedule, endure their weather and roll the dice as a predator. Of course, there are ways to make hunting even more of a challenge. Limiting yourself to the range of archery equipment is the most popular way to do this. Even using a muzzleloader can add some additional nuances, and if nothing more, makes you feel like you could be hunting alongside Jeremiah Johnson or Daniel Boone. Some hunters choose to hunt areas that are only accessible by primitive transportation such as canoes or horseback. One of my favorite ways to exaggerate the rawness of hunting is by pursuing deer through the harsh weather of late gun seasons. The bitter cold and snow that settles into Iowa through the December gun and muzzleloader seasons can present a sharp challenge for the average blaze orange soldier. Developing an effective approach is imperative if you want to maximize your time spent freezing in your prey’s world.

The phrase “a bad day of hunting is better than a good day of working” is one of the truest statements ever recorded. But the ratio of good to bad gets slimmer when you feel you are the only living creature enduring the harsh winter weather in your hunting area. This is the biggest problem with hunting the late seasons- spending all your time hunting areas which do not hold many deer throughout that season. In Iowa the most likely problem you will face is a lack of thermal bedding cover that insulates deer from gusting winds and the frozen ground. The only way to decipher if this is the problem is through preseason scouting. One farm I hunt every year has excellent deer activity March-November, but once the winter weather begins to gust in my trail cameras turn up dry. There is plenty of corn left on the ground, but deer simply choose to migrate to other local areas that offer more substantial thermal cover to pair with the food resources in that area. Successful late season gun hunters do the same. Many times hunters make the mistake of assuming that stands of timber equate to adequate bedding cover for deer. While most timber stands do have some warm season bedding value, many become inadequate once the weather turns cold. Only the timbered lots with dense ground-level cover will consistently hold deer through the winter months.

Although food is abundant year round in Iowa it still can serve as a limiting factor for deer during the late season. Every year the amount of fall tilling that takes place immediately following harvest seems more prevalent than the year prior. This reality can make hunting the late season easier if you use it to narrow down where deer will have to go in order to feed. The later the gun season the greater the amount of pressure all deer have endured. When deer are pressured they will often frustrate hunters by changing their behavior, but they still have to eat. Paul Farrar, a good friend of mine, consistently kills big bucks during the late muzzleloader season. He once mentioned to me that deer will often sacrifice safety for high quality, late season food. Paul went on to tell me about a fellow hunter he knows who utilized this strategy to kill a big buck on some heavily pressured public land that had a large late season food plot. The temptation for the energy resource was too much for the buck to pass up and he made his fatal slip choosing to eat instead of evade.

Many bow hunters and gun hunters like to take friendly (usually) jabs at each other’s preferred method of acquiring venison, but gun hunters would be wise to lay aside their differences and borrow a few tricks from bow hunters. Because bow hunters have to maintain such tight proximity to their quarry, many have become masters of minimizing their human impact on the habitat. Something I have heard numerous hunters say is that your first sit provides your best opportunity because it’s the least disturbed your hunting area will be by human presence. The same is true for your hunting gear. When on a hunting road trip the temptation to turn the back of your hunting rig into a man-sized rodent nest is almost insurmountable. A good hunter will do their best to keep their hunting gear packed away to avoid scent contamination as much as possible. But even with these precautionary steps, without washing your hunting gear, or treating them with ozone scent elimination after each hunt, your gear is going to progressively smell more alarming to deer. This is why I think gun hunters should use scent eliminating/masking sprays to help minimize their scent, especially multiple days into a hunting trip.

Hunting from a treestand is one trick I think gun hunters borrow from bow hunters too much. Obviously the biggest advantage for gun hunters is the distance from which they can be lethal, and a well-placed treestand allows a hunter to see large portions of the area they are hunting. Despite that advantage, treestands can cause you to redundantly hunt one single area. If your goal is to kill large, older bucks you may need to take a risk or two and move from your normal stand location and try locating the buck you want as opposed to waiting for him to saunter out in front of you. In order to maximize mobility to other hunting sites I suggest trying an occasional ground hunt. Since you lose a large portion of your sight advantage on the ground, scouting where deer spend their time before you move into a new area is imperative. If you do take the time to find significant deer sign and even locate deer during preseason scouting, you can put yourself into a great position to cash in on the advantage of your long range weaponry and take a poke at a cagey old Iowa buck.

A common pitfall ground hunters can find themselves in is the itch to move too early. If you are like me, you prefer to make it to your setup well before first light and waiting for the landscape to awaken begins to feel about as timely as your most recent experience at the DMV. In order to spare yourself the inner turmoil of whether or not to bail on your first setup, use the trick my buddy Weston Chesling taught me. Through decades of December gun hunts Weston has observed that deer seem to consistently begin moving in conjunction with the start of birds calling through the timber. Whether or not there is a scientific correlation to support his observation, I couldn’t tell you, but it does provide a useful time marker for keeping you still long enough to find out if you’re going to see any deer moving in your area. Once you have been convinced deer movement in your area has cooled off, then you can decide to relocate to a more aggressive setup where you think the deer are going to spend their day. To see ground hunting/stalking demonstrated with great proficiency, tune in to the content being produced by The Hunting Public team. They routinely kill mature bucks while hunting on the ground.

Blaze orange is an interesting reality to consider. Safety should always be the top priority when hunting so blaze orange is a welcome requirement. However, during bow season camouflage is considered a staple, even to the point of smearing greasy paint all over one’s mug. I read an article* once about how deer perceive color. I had already suspected that they didn’t perceive blaze orange the same way we do otherwise gun season would have never caught on. The article confirmed my suspicions and I remember coming away with the knowledge that the only color a hunter should avoid wearing is blue. Nonetheless, just because deer don’t see blaze orange the same way we see a State Trooper’s red and blue lights when we forgot to use cruise control, doesn’t mean that we are invisible. Wearing a giant, solid orange parka will make us appear like a well-placed slab of granite 15 feet up a tree. Instead look for blaze orange duds that include some late season break-up patterns such as dead tree limbs or bare branches mixed in. This will ensure we still look as flamboyant as a road cone to fellow hunters, and like an oversized oak burl to every passing whitetail.

Gun season is one of the paramount outdoor traditions in Iowa. Many hunters have hunted the same farm, with the same people, with the same technique and gear for decades and they are wholly content enjoying their predictable success. To them I emphatically say don’t fix what isn’t broke. To the hunter who is chasing a different result from gun seasons past, why not mix it up? Gratifying the primal urge of getting food the hard way is why we’re out there freezing year after year anyway.