The Free Press, Mankato, MN

John Cross

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November 7, 2009

Corn forces change to opener strategy

By my own fuzzy math, I’ve been opening up the Minnesota firearms deer season west of Lowry in Pope County for 25 years.

In that quarter century, depending on the vagaries of the weather, even the most unambitious area farmers usually have things buttoned up or nearly so by this second week of November.

But not this year. Not after October.

Not that anyone really needs a reminder, but it rained. And rained. And rained some more.

And while south-central Minnesota might yet be characterized as damp after such a miserable month, in the Mankato area, farmers have mostly completed the soybean harvest and are well into the corn.

Up here, host Ken Weisel and his neighbors are just now getting into the soybean fields and even at that, the heavy, sticky soil threatens to mire down the combines.

Translated into deer hunting terms, it means that the vast stands of corn remain virtually untouched, an endless sea of cover for whitetails to disappear into.

The challenge might best be illustrated by the 160-acre (that’s a quarter-section) cornfield across the road from the Weisel farm that has nary a combine track in it.

Chasing deer out into the open from such a vast acreage is impossible.

But it is a similar story on even a 60- or 80-acre corn stand. Driving deer from such secure and endless cover is futile.

Thus, our plan of attack this year is simply to set up in the morning and evenings in strategic locations and hope to intercept a whitetail.

Saturday morning found me in my usual location on the South 80 on the edge of a deserted farmstead.

It has been a very productive spot for me over the years, yielding several deer.

This year, the field adjacent to my posting site is unharvested soybeans.

Several hundred yards to the south, an adjoining property is covered by an unharvested cornfield.

Yesterday morning, a doe and triplet fawns entertained me for a while as they wandered through the beans before fading into the unpicked cornfield.

A half-hour later, two young bucks — a spike and a forkhorn — sparred with one another before melting away into the unharvested field as well.

In both cases, the deer where well beyond the range of even the accurate high-powered rifle, let alone by slug gun.

As I write this on Saturday afternoon, I have plans of moving my stand to the overgrown fence line adjacent to the cornfield for the evening hunt.

In the meantime, by 10 a.m., we all had gathered at the farmyard and shared similar tales of deer melting into the corn too far away to shoot.

The consensus was we should fill in the rest of the morning by pursuing the dozens of pheasants several of the others had seen while sitting on their deer stands.

After exchanging deer loads for bird shot, behind a couple of hunting dogs, we waded into a couple of sloughs that we had been assured were teeming with roosters.

By lunch time, we were back in the farmyard with nary a bird.

The corn had swallowed up even them.



John Cross is a Free Press staff writer. Contact him at 344-6376 or by e-mail at jcross@mankatofreepress.com.

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John Cross