STANDING CORN FRIEND OR FOE?
Love it or hate it, standing corn is a crop that bowhunters must deal with. And while most of them prefer that corn is harvested before the rut phases to improve their kill opportunities, if it’s not harvested by then, they would rather have it left standing through gun season to improve the odds of mature bucks surviving until late bow season.
Under normal seasonal weather conditions, cornfields are typically cut for silage or picked by mid- to late-October. However, during unseasonably wet seasons, many cornfields are left standing well into or even throughout the hunting season.
Other than the rare dry cattail marsh, a standing cornfield is in a class of its own because it’s tall and dense enough for mature bucks, headgear included, to bed in and transition through. And corn is also a major food source.
For those mature bucks that bed in and spend most of their daylight hours in standing corn, their daytime movements, routines, sightings and signposts, in the form of rubs and scrapes beyond their perimeters, will be diminished. But once cornfields are cut, they immediately lose their daytime security status and mature bucks rarely, if ever,
