Non-resident hunting pressure increases

In Iowa, the whitetail deer population decreased by 11% from 2024 to 2025 with a particular decline noted in central and western Iowa in the wake of severe hemorrhagic disease impacts from 2024 and 2023.

This trend is occurring across the Midwest, driving both Iowa residents and non-residents toward Southwest Iowa where the decline is less prevalent.

This topic was one of the themes brought up by local hunters and trappers who attended a public meeting held by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources last week to recap the previous seasons.

More than two dozen showed up at Southwestern Community College March 3 to hear from DNR wildlife biologist Josh Rusk, the successor to Chad Paup.

“There were quite a few comments about deer hunting,” Rusk said. “There’s been some concerns of lower deer numbers and also some comments on reducing antlerless tags in Adair County.”

In 2025, 23 western counties, primarily the northwest, were restricted to antlered deer only during the first shotgun season.

“There are indications that deer population changes and lower deer numbers in other parts of the state may be driving hunters to move to different areas for deer hunting,” Rusk added. “This year we saw a lot more non-resident pressure than I feel like we ever have. We saw a lot more non-resident deer hunters on our public hunting areas.”

The additional hunters aren’t just coming for deer season as Rusk said there were higher numbers of pheasant and quail hunters.

Rusk explained that quail is a fairly common bird across the lower third of the state. Depending on the winter, they can push further north, even up near Missouri Valley and the Ottawa area up along the water. But when winters are rough, they stay mostly south.

“We have pretty decent quail hunting clear up into Adair and Madison counties,” Rusk said. “The bird hunting was just better this year, and so I think that brought more people into the state in general.”

While bringing in visitors can be a boost to local economy, it can also result in less animals available for local hunters. The DNR can adjust the deer tag quota for non-residents based on feedback.

“We don’t have as much control over our upland bird hunting as far as the state areas go, but there are some proposals out there that we’re looking at as far as maybe limiting the public areas to residents only for the first week of the season,” Rusk explained. “There’s some discussion on possibly doing that on public ground only and some discussion of having non-residents identify different seven-day periods that they can use their license as opposed to having a yearlong license.”

Another topic of conversation brought up by hunters was the raccoon population.

“People are concerned about too many raccoons,” Rusk said. “That was one of the comments and what we are going to do about it. We’ve really kind of done everything we can do about that, as far as opening up the season to continuous open season on coons.”

The idea is for people to have options on what they can do with nuisance raccoons on their own properties and around their farms.

Other concerns were the effects of wind turbines on animals and on the loss of CRP.

Overall, hunters were happy with the pheasant and quail hunting this year and were encouraged to see more swans migrating through the area.

“We’ve seen way more swans that we ever have this year moving through the area and staying on our lakes,” Rusk said. “So people are excited about that.”

The DNR hosts these meetings annually to get comments from locals on what they are seeing throughout the year.

“The point of that meeting is to try to get as much public input as possible on these things. And we’re getting to the point where we can’t really make significant changes without the support of the public and the support of our hunters,” Rusk said. “These meetings are important for us to get that support. We have pursued things that we’ve got from these meetings in the past to make changes. So it’s an important meeting, and we’d like all the hunters and trappers to consider coming to these in the future.”