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Deer Hunting when Crop is Standing

tbutcher | Dec 3, 2009 |

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This year was a very tough year for deer hunters in North Dakota. Between the unusually warm weather, the extra moister from a cold/wet summer and all the corn still standing it made deer hunting challenging to say the least. This article will highlight the way we were able to fill most of our tags, while other hunters went home empty.

The main way people Deer hunt in North Dakota is unlike hunting in other parts of the country. Where most area of the country you sit/post in a stand, blind or bushes. In North Dakota you do what is called "pushing". This consists of walking fields, cattails and shelter belts much like if you were bird hunting without the benefit of a bird dog with you. If you come upon a deer, it will jump up and run and you try to shot it while it is running. A lot of people are kind of taken back by this method, but you have to understand there is so much open land up here that the deer simply lay down in the grass or trees and stay until the sun goes down.

This year the typical push method did not work well at all. This was due to thousands of acres of corn still standing at a time when it would normally be harvested. Because of all the standing corn, the deer were not lying in a field or the trees, instead they were bedding down in the middle of the corn; and why not? If you were a deer, wouldn't you? You have shelter and food, and hunters are not able to come in looking for you. We recognized this early and instead of pushing, looked for corn fields that were bordered by a shelter belt. We then would then walk the outside looking for scrapes on the ground to indicate a buck was in the area and setup in the trees about 100 years from the most recent scrapes. Typically we setup about 1 hour before sunset and sat. The deer would typically start moving out of the corn at or just after sunset. This method allowed us to fill 3 out of our 4 tags in a very lackluster year.

Now that deer rifle season is over and the farmers have the beans off the field, it is time to get my Wirehaired Pointing Griffons out and go find some pheasants.