Cold & Snowy Shotgun 1

These will come in handy with frigid weekend temps.

A giant slice of the Arctic pie has slammed into the Midwest and Iowa for the Gun season opener. According to the DNR over 70,000 hunters will don the blaze and brave the cold. So while you're contemplating your sanity and getting ready for the hunt, I thought we'd talk about the good, the bad and the ugly about hunting in Arctic cold.

Rutting activity is still being observed and will collide with gun season.

The good: Cold moves game. Especially windless cold. Just like your furnace kicking on relentlessly, a deer's metabolism increases to burn calories and maintain body temperature. And just like the natural gas, electricity or wood burned for fuel, deer require energy to stay warm. So they feed like crazy, especially where the wind is weak. At the center of an Arctic high pressure is a heartless, windless cold and the deer flood food sources. I expect that's where they'll be come opening morning!

Active scrape refreshed by a nice buck on December 4th.

A light to moderate snow storm is shaping up for day 2 of shotgun season this year. As the storm moves in, the barometer falls and cirrostratus clouds filter the sunlight. This signal sends a message to deer to not only eat enough to stay warm, but pack in a little extra chow because the weather's going to turn, and it may not be worth it to come back to food the following day if the wind is howling and the snow is 2 feet deep. One of my favorite times to hunt is the afternoon before a winter storm.

Cirrostratus ahead of a winter storm.

Snow is expected to blanket most of the state in 2"-4" of fresh powder. Snow can be one of the very best weather conditions to hunt in for many reasons. Chiefly, it makes the normally well camouflaged deer stand out like sore thumbs. Visually, it blocks distant vantages so that deer that picks you off and tips off the herd when you park your truck a mile away will have no idea you're coming. It also disorients when falling heavily allowing you to slip up on a wary whitetail. Our steps are quieter in the woods when there's fresh snow and cutting a big track is a breeze. You can even guess the age of a track within minutes as snow is falling using a best guess on its freshness and the rate of snow falling.

Bundle Up!

The bad: You'll have to fight through many layers, and odds are you wont have enough to truly abate the nasty wind chill. Guns, trucks and other mechanical things break, and they do it on the coldest day of the year. Gun oil has viscosity that nearly solidifies in extreme cold conditions, resulting in a dangerous misfire or seized firing pin and otherwise useless weapon. And usually you don't know it until that 11pt buck steps into range.

Ice conditions are variable and can be dangerous this time of year.

The ice is growing, but still dangerous and recent wind has made for broken ice, pressure fissures and variable ice depths. Cross rivers, streams and other waterways with extreme caution if you choose to cross at all. I will be putting out an ice-depth chart and forecast in the next blog and I expect ice conditions to improve vastly by next weekend. Finally, aside from the brutal and harassing arctic wind chill, the woods will be exceptionally noisy as it often is under high pressure and frozen ground. Expect sounds like your truck door closing or snow boots over crunchy leaves to carry well beyond shotgun range. Turn this problem into an asset and you'll be standing over an Arctic trophy.

The Ugly: I lied. There's no uglyness to Arctic cold. It just is. So be prepared for it and go get that buck that escaped me during bow season. Be sure to dress warmly. Once you think you've got enough layers-add another. And if you have the luxury, crank up the heat in a blind overlooking a good travel corridor. That way you can roast marshmallows, read a book and stay toasty while the rest of us push the deer for ya! Then go cut some tracks in the snow on Sunday in the 20° weather. It'll seem like a heat wave :)

Good luck!