WORKING PAPERS, GUIDES & DATASETS
Filter by topic, state, and county.
Every paper traces to a public record; every field guide states its method. Topics span states and counties — a trophy-geography paper covers the western river counties, a county report covers all 102, and the field guides carry across all of it. Filter to what you hunt.
The Illinois Whitetail County Report
All 102 counties tiered A–E on two decades of harvest, herd condition, and access. Edgar leads the state, and the western river counties no longer dominate the way their reputation suggests.
Deer–Vehicle Collisions as a Herd-Density Signal
Thirty-six years and 3,672 county-year observations, normalized to expose the density gradient that raw crash counts hide. The state's freest deer-population proxy.
Twenty Years of Illinois Harvest
Statewide harvest fell 15% from its 2005 peak via a hard 2013 disease trough, then partially recovered, while chronic wasting disease spread to 28 counties.
The Rise and Fall of the Golden Triangle
The Triangle's fame is mature bucks, not deer numbers. Pike's total harvest fell 48% since 2005, but its mature-buck kill fell 39% and still holds 77% of the buck harvest; Adams held even better, down just 6%.
Big-Buck Geography: Does Trophy Production Follow the Rivers?
The oldest belief in Illinois deer hunting (that the biggest bucks live along the big rivers) tested county by county on the FDR Trophy Index. Half true: a modest river premium, but the top counties are inland.
Public vs. Private: Where Illinois Deer Are Actually Killed
National data says 88% of the whitetail harvest comes off private ground. In Illinois it is closer to 97%: public land yields about 3% of the kill. Which tracts punch above their acreage.
The CWD Epicenter: Wisconsin's Southern Herd at the Threshold
Southern Wisconsin holds 87% of the state's chronic wasting disease, adult-buck prevalence tops 30%, and research puts the population-decline tipping point at 29% female prevalence. The disease's slow move north is the forward risk.
Two States, Opposite Bets: How Wisconsin and Missouri Manage CWD
Neighboring states, the same disease, opposite strategies. Wisconsin intensifies: heavy sampling, liberal antlerless harvest. Missouri simplifies: dropping its CWD zone, antler restrictions, and special season for 2026–27. A natural experiment with the herd as the stake.
The Quiet Champion: Why Indiana Punches Above Its Size
By trophy-buck density per square mile, Indiana has led the nation since 2016: a state a fraction the size of its famous neighbors. The engine isn't acreage; it's the one-buck rule, which ages the herd into antlers.
The Rifle Line Falls: What SB 280 Changes for Indiana
Indiana's 2025 law erased all rifle-cartridge restrictions and the public-versus-private firearm split. More reach in the woods raises harvest efficiency, and puts pressure on the one-buck rule that built the state's trophy reputation.
The Two-Disease State: Mapping Michigan's Bovine TB and CWD
Michigan is the rare state fighting two deer diseases at once: bovine tuberculosis entrenched in the northeast Lower Peninsula, chronic wasting disease under surveillance across the UP and Lower. Two diseases, two maps, one herd.
The Baiting Divide: One State, Two Rules
Michigan bans baiting across the entire Lower Peninsula but allows it, with limits, in the Upper. The split isn't arbitrary: it's disease geography written into regulation, and a case study in how policy follows the map.
Two Missouris: The Cropland North and the Acorn-Driven Ozarks
Missouri's deer harvest is really two states. The northern cropland counties are stable and productive; the forested Ozarks swing hard with the acorn crop. The same fall can be a good year up north and a bust in the south.
The Whiplash Season: Why Missouri's Harvest Swings
Missouri set an all-time harvest record in 2023–24, fell 15% the next year, then rebounded: a three-year whiplash driven not by the herd but by acorns, weather, and season timing. What actually moves the number.
The Density Paradox: Wisconsin's Fullest Woods Are Its Sickest
Wisconsin's Southern Farmland zone carries the state's highest deer densities and its most liberal, often unlimited, antlerless tags. It is also the CWD epicenter. The paradox: the ground hunters most want to hunt is the ground the state most needs to thin.
One State, Two Herds: The UP Winter Machine vs. the Ag Belt
Michigan's Upper Peninsula runs a boom-bust deer herd governed by winter severity; the southern Lower Peninsula is stable ag country. A 2024 UP buck-harvest jump of 15–21% on a mild winter, against a flat south, is the divide in one season.
Kansas: The Permit Is the Product
Kansas grows some of the biggest whitetails in America and makes non-residents draw for the privilege. That scarcity isn't a bug: the draw-only permit system is the mechanism that protects the quality every applicant is chasing.
Ohio: The Open Giant
Ohio produces Kansas-caliber bucks with none of Kansas's access friction: a one-buck rule, liberal doe harvest, and largely over-the-counter tags. The 2024 EHD outbreak in the southeast is the one crack in an otherwise open door.
Nebraska: Buy the Corridor, Not the State
Nebraska sells non-residents over-the-counter access to a state whose deer quality is concentrated on its river corridors, while whitetail harvest slides and mule deer fall faster than the state expected. Open access, narrowing quality.
Illinois Has Two Deer Seasons: The Archery Map
The bow's share of the Illinois harvest rose from 35% to 47% in twenty years, but the statewide average hides a hard split. The metro northeast is almost entirely archery; the rural south and west are firearm country. Method is a map of land and law.
The Two-Tier Map: Why Half of America's Deer Data Isn't County Data
Seven states record the county where every deer is killed. Five never resolve harvest below a management unit (four by mailed survey, Minnesota by permit-area registration) so a county figure for them is not sourced, it is invented.
The Non-Resident Scorecard: Where an Out-of-State Tag Actually Pays
Nine Midwest states, three questions: can you even get the tag, what does it cost, and does the state give you county-grade data to scout with. Scored side by side.
Watching the Rut Happen: 132 Weekly Reports from Ohio
Ohio's mandatory in-season telecheck produces a weekly statewide kill curve no one plots for hunters: it ramps with the November rut, then spikes in gun week.
Why Deer-Crash Maps Lie
Raw deer-vehicle-crash counts get sold as a deer-density map. They are a traffic map. The denominator is vehicle-miles, so the metro suburbs light up and the best deer counties look empty.
Is the Deer Decline Real? A Seven-State County Look
Harvest is down by half in two states, barely moved in two others, and rising in a third. “The deer decline” is not one thing: it is herd size, antlerless policy, and disease shocks braided into a single misleading total.
The 2012 Fingerprint: How One Disease Summer Still Shows in the Harvest
A brutal 2012 hemorrhagic-disease outbreak cut a single-season notch into the harvest across the Midwest, then held as a lower plateau. It reset the level; it did not start a slide.
Iowa, County by County: Two Decades of the Most Coveted Draw
Iowa is the non-resident dream (a limited draw and a big-buck reputation) yet statewide harvest is down 51% from its 2005 peak. The county map says the decline is nearly universal in direction and wildly uneven in size.
The Vanishing Counties: What Wisconsin Stopped Counting
In a 2025 data rebuild, Wisconsin's published county deer-harvest record shrank from 72 counties to 61: eleven Northern-Forest counties dropped with the note that “there is no historical data to provide.” The data existed. FDR recovered it.
Two Numbers, One Herd: Michigan's Reporting Gap
Michigan measures its deer harvest two ways (a mandatory registration and a hunter survey) and in the years both ran, they disagreed by up to 17%. FDR keeps them separate.
The Buck-to-Doe Fingerprint: Reading Management Intent from the Harvest
The ratio of bucks to does in a state's harvest, tracked over its own history, is the fingerprint of deliberate herd reduction. It is only readable within a state, never across a state line.
Public Ground, Real Numbers: The Herd Data Buried in Management Plans
Hunters believe public-land herd data doesn't exist. It does, across nearly 4,900 named state and federal properties, but it's written as prose inside management plans, not published as tables. That's a data-shape problem, not an absence.
The Trophy-Count Trap: Why You Can't Rank States by Record-Book Numbers
Cumulative record-book totals mostly measure how hard a state pushes hunters to report, not how many big deer it grows. The honest tool is a within-state rank, never a cross-state count leaderboard.
The Rut Moves South: What Ohio's Weekly Data Says About Timing
Inside Ohio, the archery kill peaks a few days earlier along Lake Erie than along the Ohio River: a small, consistent latitude shift that no other Midwest state can even measure.
Kansas Without a County: Hunting a Survey State
Kansas is a non-resident dream and a data outlier: harvest is estimated by unit from a post-season hunter survey, so there is no county-of-kill figure. The smart way to read the state follows from that limitation.
The Perishable Record: The Deer Data That Disappears
Minnesota's per-deer registration is a current-season snapshot overwritten every year; North Dakota's prior-year files return errors; Wisconsin deleted eleven counties. The richest deer data is perishable: capture it or lose it.
Buying Deer Ground: An Independent Read on County Quality
Land listings assert trophy potential to justify the price per acre. FDR's county harvest and trophy-tier data is an independent layer a buyer can check before believing the sales copy.
When the Herd Bounces Back: What Two Decades Say About Recovery
After a disease summer or a hard winter, what did the harvest record actually do? It recovered: slowly, partially, and to a ceiling set by management, not to the old highs. A look back, not a forecast.
The Season-Structure Atlas: How Nine States Actually Let You Hunt
Archery windows, firearm seasons, weapon restrictions, and buck limits for nine Midwest states, assembled cleanly in one place, with a note on which structural choices quietly grow older bucks.
Where the Giants Live: One Honest Trophy Ranking, and Why Only One
Rank Illinois by raw record-book listings and you crown Pike and Will. Rank it by a full, cross-deduplicated index and Edgar leads while Will falls to the sixties, because a pile of old listings is history, not the herd you will hunt. It is also why FDR ranks trophy quality in exactly one state.
The Data Hunter's Field Guide: Reading Government Deer Numbers Without Getting Fooled
Five ways official deer statistics mislead (a headline that's secretly a subset, a mislabeled season, a goal dressed as a measurement, a crash map, a county that doesn't exist), each with a verified example and the tell that catches it.
Wisconsin's 85-Year Arc: The Rise and Fall of a Deer Empire
The longest continuous county harvest record we hold (Wisconsin 1939–2025) tells a full-cycle story: post-war scarcity, a managed mid-century explosion, a ~615,200 peak in 2000, then a halving under deliberate herd reduction and the CWD era.
The Two Iowas: Where the Deer Actually Are
Iowa's non-resident reputation is statewide, but its deer are wildly concentrated: the driftless northeast timber-and-river country carries the harvest while the intensively row-cropped northwest is nearly empty, a ~66× county spread.
The Straight-Wall Revolution: How Three States Rewrote the Gun Line
Between 2014 and 2026, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan each began dismantling the shotgun-only firearm rule that governed the eastern Corn Belt, starting with straight-wall cartridges and, in two of the three, moving all the way to full rifle.
The Best Deer Data in America Is on a Military Base
Department of Defense installations run controlled hunts with mandatory check-in, and publish the finest-grain per-property deer data in the country, down to the individual hunt day.
The Non-Resident Point Game: Building and Spending Points for Midwest Whitetail
Iowa and Kansas, the two premier draw states for out-of-state whitetail, run point systems that Western big-game strategy misreads. Here is how to build and spend them on purpose.
How Crowded Is That Public Land? The Variable Nobody Maps
Mapping apps show you where the public ground is. None of them show how many other hunters are standing on it. Illinois is the one state that publishes per-site hunter effort, and it reveals that public land ranges from a parking-lot zoo to near-solitude, with some of the quietest ground still producing deer.
The Wind You Can't See: Thermals and the Stand That Gets Busted on a Perfect Wind
The forecast gives you one arrow. In any country with a hill in it, a second air current runs on the sun's schedule (rising as the ground warms, sinking as it cools) and it routinely overrides the wind you planned around. It is the most common reason a careful hunter still gets winded, and almost nothing computes it.
Reading the Ground: What LIDAR Shows That Satellite Can't
An aerial photo shows the roof of the woods: the green canopy. It cannot show the floor beneath it, where deer actually move. Laser terrain mapping can, and the features it reveals are the ones that decide a hunt: the bench, the saddle, the ditch that pinches most of a drainage into one crossing.
The Sun Budget: Why a Cold-Season South Slope Is Worth More Than It Looks
In the cold months a deer spends its day where the calories are cheapest, and on a low winter sun, a slope that faces the light banks hours of free warmth its neighbor across the draw never sees. This is the third terrain layer, and the one hunters feel but rarely measure: not relief, not wind, but the daily energy budget of the ground itself.
One in Three: Wisconsin's CWD, Recalculated
The state's headline number (about 5% of deer ever tested) averages twenty-six years into one figure and hides an accelerating disease. In the 2025 sampling year prevalence was 11.1%, and in the southern core roughly one deer in three tested positive.
Missouri's CWD Doesn't Creep — It Jumps
933 positive deer mapped to the section of ground where each was killed, 2011–2025. For three years the disease stayed within a half-mile of one spot in Macon County. Then it stopped spreading and started teleporting, a hundred to two hundred miles at a time.
The On-Ramp: Captive Deer and the 69-County Watch List
CWD travels two ways: on the deer, slowly, and on us, quickly. 58% of counties with an infected captive facility also carry wild CWD. The other 69 counties have an infected facility and no wild case yet. That list is a leading indicator.
The Crash That Hasn't Come: CWD Prevalence vs. the Wisconsin Herd
Prevalence in the southern core has climbed to one in three deer. So we asked the two most independent field signals we have (deer-vehicle collisions and harvest) whether the core herd is falling faster than the rest of the state. As of 2024, it is not. That is a clock, not an all-clear.
Pick the Tree, Not the Ridge
Spring turkey season is bare-canopy season, the one window a year when an aerial photograph shows limb structure instead of leaf surface. At three to six inches per pixel a roost tree stops being texture and becomes an object you can point at.
The East Bench Really Does Win the Morning
The oldest rule in turkey hunting says gobblers work the slope the sun reaches first. We measured it across a whole Illinois county against the terrain horizon each bench actually sees. For once the lore holds, and the exception only shows on steep ground.
The Loneliest Public Turkey Ground in Illinois
Public-land turkey hunting is a contest over distance from the parking lot, not over birds. We ranked every public hunting tract in the state by how far it sits from the nearest place to leave a truck.
Rank Your Strut Benches by Morning Sun, Not by Gut
Two openings two hundred yards apart look identical on a map, and one banks more than double the sunlight in the two hours after fly-down. That difference is computable before you ever walk in.
Illinois Deer Harvest by County, 2005–2024
County × year × method × sex, from IDNR public records. Preview and sample free; full 20-season series by request.
Illinois Deer–Vehicle Collisions, 1989–2024
Thirty-six-year county-year collision density series: an open proxy for relative herd density, free to use with attribution.
Illinois Public-Land Access Coverage
Public hunting tracts, acreage, and mapped parking and access points by county.
When to Trust Your Wind Forecast — and When It's Lying
Forecast wind arrows get measurably less reliable in calm, clear, cold conditions — the classic perfect morning. Why point forecasts break in timber, and how to screen scent risk before the walk-in.
Reading a Bench, Saddle, and Draw on a Topo Map
The three terrain features that decide where deer travel and bed — what each looks like in contour lines, what deer do with it, and why a coarse contour interval hides half of them.
How to Check a Landowner Name Before You Knock
Where parcel data comes from, why the name on a hunting app can be two years stale, and a five-minute county-roll workflow to verify the owner of record before a permission ask.
Reading Public-Land Pressure: Effort, Not Distance
The collar studies don't say hunters walk a mile — they say hunters avoid effort. A desk method for finding the blind-spot pockets before the drive, using access points, slope, and hydrology.
Finding Buck Bedding in Flat Farmland
Why hill-country bedding doctrine breaks where there's no relief, where deer actually bed on flat ground, and what 1-meter LIDAR shows on terrain that reads as featureless.
Standing Corn and the Rut: How Harvest Timing Rewires Movement
Why deer live inside standing corn, what a fresh cut changes within 48 hours, the September-to-January harvest swing, and how a county-level read beats driving roads.
The Permission Playbook: Asking Like the Hunters Who Get a Yes
Reverse-engineered from what high performers report — the packet, the letter, resolving LLC and trust owners, timing the ask to the crop calendar, and a lease-scam defense.
Deer Movement Scores vs. What the Collar Studies Support
An evidence-first look at the percent-score category and moon-phase claims — and a sorted ledger of what is knowable about a hunting day versus what no honest tool can score.
Leaf-Off Aerial Imagery: What Winter Photos Reveal
Why the default summer basemap hides edges, timber types, and trails, how to audit your imagery age before trusting it, and what leaf-off winter orthos put back on the map.
Designing Food Plots and Property Layouts on a Map
A map-first walkthrough of a real parcel: plot placement against neighbor context and LIDAR funnels, entry routes as scent-risk zones, sizing to browse pressure, and a placement checklist.