It's legal to put an antlerless tag on a button buck, but the IDNR and most serious hunters discourage harvesting young male deer. There are several ways to tell if an antlerless deer is a button buck. "In the fall when you see a group of antlerless deer, the bigger ones will be does," Suchy said. "The small ones are fawns, and usually the smallest fawns are females. Sometimes during the late season, bucks have already shed their antlers. They look big in the chest and neck, and appear to be blocky compared to sleek does."

Rick White has a simpler way to tell button bucks from does. "I always carry binoculars. When using them you can often see the stubby antlers nestled in the hair. Also, I target mature does that are bigger than buck fawns," he said.

Many hunters are buying combinations of tags that let them hunt from the start of the early October bow season to the end of the January Special Hunt. Some are shooting many does by taking advantage of special urban and park tags and general statewide tags.

Cedar Rapids archer Dave Heck harvested 10 deer in the 2004 season. One was a decent buck, and all the others were does. "I shot one with a muzzleloader but the rest were archery deer," he said. Most of the deer were harvested within a couple of miles of his Cedar Rapids home. Schrantz also shot several deer.

Increasingly, too, hunters are sharing their harvest with nonhunting friends and neighbors. "I gave venison to many of my friends, and they love it," said Schrantz. I had a somewhat similar experience. After I had shot my third deer of the season, the freezer was stuffed, and I was ready to stop hunting and let my January tag go unfilled. One evening the phone rang, and a friend asked if I planned to do any late-season hunting. He wasn't a hunter, but had friends who had fallen on hard times.

"I told him I had a tag and would try to bag a doe, which he could give to his friends if they would help me butcher and wrap the deer. My January deer ended up in the larder of several appreciative Iowa residents struggling to make ends meet."

At the time this article was written, the IDNR hadn't yet tallied up the total 2004-05 harvest, but it was probably around 200,000 deer. That's up from around 20,000 per year in the early 1980s. At a conservative 50 pounds of boned out meat per deer that's 10 million pounds of nutritious food for Iowa's people. And, the tenfold increase in the harvest is astonishing. More deer were legally harvested in Iowa than lived in the state just a few decades ago!

Two years ago outdoor writer Larry Stone was commissioned by the IDNR to write a comprehensive book on the history of Iowa's Whitetail Deer. The book, Whitetail -- Treasure, Trophy, or Trouble, is a must-read for anyone interested in Iowa deer.

According to Stone, deer were abundant in the state's early days and likely peaked at a herd of about 400,000 animals in 1850. Unfortunately, massive habitat damage and unregulated hunting extirpated the species in just 50 years. Gradually deer began trickling into Iowa from Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Missouri. Others were stocked or escaped from captive herds. By the 1940s, deer remained scarce, but were increasing.