I haven't posted in a while here been pretty busy. Anyway, I had an opportunity to do some scouting in Western IA so I took it. It was a public area with a mixture of wooded ridges and drainages with corn fields around it.
Here are some of the sign I found with some photos from google earth to help visualize.
One ridge I found was littered with beds. It was a south facing slope with crops above and below. Most of the deer exited down to go to the crop fields.
Here is a google earth image. I found to areas you can see the beds marked in yellow. Something to note is that it just snowed a couple inches 2 days before I was here.
Here are some pictures of the beds I found. I would guess there were 40-50 beds along this ridge most of which were in the areas I marked them above.
This standing near the top of the farthest north ridge where I found the majority of the beds, looking down the ridge towards the direction of the red arrows. You can see there was actually quite a bit of under growth of smaller trees and a lot of briars. I think that is why this was where I found so many more beds on this ridge apposed to others.
Here are a couple pics of rubs I found as well.
I realize a lot of this is winter bedding but I would dare to guess this is a great bedding area during the fall as well.
Another really cool spot I found was an actual shelf. It was a near 10' drop off from the shelf down but they were still able to go up and down it and they were. There was a good half dozen beds right on the edge of that shelf with the perfect vantage point looking out. For some reason I didn't take any photos of the beds here, sorry. But here is a google earth photo. Again all entering and exiting was going down from the beds not a lot going up.
This was a North Facing Slope I found that interesting also.
Here are just a few overview photos of the area.
They left 3 areas of standing corn and you could see it was getting hammered. One area had a small ridge adjacent and they were bedding within 100 yards of the corn. Not surprised at all just very cool to see.
Anyway just thought I'd share because it really demonstrates a lot that is talked about on here.
Western IA Hill Country Scout
- westmibow
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Re: Western IA Hill Country Scout
Thanks for sharing & good luck with it next season.
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Re: Western IA Hill Country Scout
Looks more like Eastern Iowa than Western? Western is more flat. Anywho, I would expect bucks to be bedded in the areas you found those beds in the fall... In this case, those beds are in the classic spots they should be.
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Re: Western IA Hill Country Scout
Looks like great deer terrain to me! Nice write up, I hope you have great hunting!
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Re: Western IA Hill Country Scout
dan wrote:Looks more like Eastern Iowa than Western? Western is more flat. Anywho, I would expect bucks to be bedded in the areas you found those beds in the fall... In this case, those beds are in the classic spots they should be.
Definitely Western Iowa, its the bluffs to the east of the Missouri River flood plains.
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Re: Western IA Hill Country Scout
westmibow wrote:dan wrote:Looks more like Eastern Iowa than Western? Western is more flat. Anywho, I would expect bucks to be bedded in the areas you found those beds in the fall... In this case, those beds are in the classic spots they should be.
Definitely Western Iowa, its the bluffs to the east of the Missouri River flood plains.
Interesting... I thought most of it was flat out that way.
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Re: Western IA Hill Country Scout
Jackson Marsh wrote:Looks like great deer terrain to me! Nice write up, I hope you have great hunting!
X2. Very nice write up. Good luck!
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