(Radio Iowa) – Iowa’s busiest and largest hunting seasons will be kicking off shortly, as the first of the state’s two shotgun seasons for deer will open in about two weeks. Nate Carr, an Iowa D-N-R conservation officer, says deer hunting is extremely popular. “We see roughly 100,000 hunters get out and participate in those two seasons, and during that time, we harvest about half of the total deer harvest in Iowa within a relatively short period of time,” Carr says. “So it’s a really effective way to manage our deer herd across the state, but also see a lot of good hunter participation.”

The first deer shotgun season runs December 7th through the 11th, while the second season runs December 14th through the 22nd. Deer hunters harvested about 60-thousand deer in Iowa last year, and Carr anticipates this year’s harvest will round out roughly the same. “Eastern, southern Iowa, we have really strong numbers and tend to have strong harvest, and so that kind of makes up for the lower population on the western side of the state right now, so it kind of balances out,” Carr says. “I think we’ll see decent numbers. Hopefully, we’ll get colder temperatures. That tends to get deer on their feet and motivate hunters to get out and pursue them.”

Iowa DNR photo

There have already been several smaller deer hunting seasons held in the state, and this year’s hot, dry weather may have been something of a hindrance. “We’re still seeing pretty decent harvest numbers. I think we’ve harvested around 25,000 deer throughout the youth season, in this early split of the archery season, as well as early muzzleloader, so we’re we’re on track,” Carr says. “We’re down a little bit, and you could probably attribute that somewhat to temperature, a little bit of hemorrhagic disease, which we’ve seen impact central Iowa quite a bit this year.”

Find much more information on the hunting seasons ahead at iowa-d-n-r-dot-gov.