DNR deer hunting restrictions aim to reverse declining population in western Iowa

Deer hunting season started Oct. 1 in Iowa, and in several western counties, hunters can only harvest bucks. These restrictions have been increasing for the past few years in response to a dropping deer population in western Iowa.

IPR's Meghan McKinney talked with Jace Elliott, a deer biologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources about deer population management strategies.

MEGHAN McKINNEY: Why is the deer population dropping in western Iowa?

JACE ELLIOTT: There's a lot of different factors that are probably leading to what we're seeing. The biggest and most obvious of which is over harvest. We were harvesting too many does for too long in those western Iowa counties, and that brought the population down to what's known as a bottleneck, where it didn't take much after that. Just really one disease outbreak in 2013, 2012 to really put that population at a troubling spot.

Land cover types have changed from 2001 to 2021, so 20 years, generally, the state has lost deer habitat. A lot of fence rows and wind breaks and sort of marginal habitat disappeared off the landscape, and that probably affected where deer were able to thrive.

McKINNEY: What kind of diseases were western Iowa deer facing?

ELLIOTT: Yeah, so EHD or bluetongue, is passed on to deer from biting insects. They don't spread it from deer to deer contact. So, it requires a biting insect known as a midge, also what a lot of people call no-see-ums, and so that the disease to transmit to deer does require those insects on the landscape.

The disease is seasonal. It really only impacts deer during late summer to early fall months, and then once we get a killing frost that would eliminate those insects from the landscape, then the disease activity is over. It is often fatal to deer, but not always fatal. In deer populations like Iowa that just don't have the same long history of EHD on the landscape, it's likely that we have a lot more deer dying from it than, for instance, states in southern U.S. that have had the disease, you know, for decades longer. So, it's fair to say that most deer that contract EHD in Iowa are going to die from that disease within a couple weeks of infection.

McKINNEY: What are the impacts we're seeing when there are low deer populations?

ELLIOTT: When we're talking about west central and southwest Iowa, we can make a pretty large blanket statement and say that deer hunters last year harvested about half of the number of bucks that they did in the mid-2000s. So that right there tells you about the difference in harvest opportunity, of course, which translates into the value of that recreational opportunity.

So, we can say that approximately the same number of deer hunters are only having half the success that they did, and we're concerned as a department about that. Because we want to do everything we can to retain the number of deer hunters we have, because deer hunters are our primary management tool for keeping deer populations at an objective level.

If we lose deer hunters in western Iowa, of course, not only is that a loss of one of Iowa's most rich natural heritages, but also threatens our ability to manage that population in the future.

McKINNEY: When you're looking in the future, and you're looking at your data and different management strategies, what's your end goal?

ELLIOT: Well, we certainly plan to keep the current restrictions in place that we have in western Iowa. And what we found in that, throughout all those meetings, is that we have overwhelming support from our hunters to maintain those restrictions. In fact, there's also a large consensus from people attending that they actually wanted to see further harvest restrictions. Now, that's something that we would explore in maybe three to five years, if we don't see the population respond in the way we expect. But right now, we have every reason to believe that our current harvest restrictions are going to start leading to a population recovery once that happens. Of course, we have to acknowledge when that population is at the management objective and basically keep the herd from getting in a problem state, but we are a long way from that currently.