Adam Oswald's Iowa Deer Blog

I made my first big shed hunt trek this past weekend by traveling 2 1/2 hours west to the Missouri River. I left my house before sunrise and arrived there around 8am. This is some serious and rugged country and by looking at topo maps I figure I walked more than 10 miles up and down these river bluffs - sometimes it was so steep that I felt like I should have had a tether rope. After an all day excursion I found... nothing! It was a long day and even though I didn't find any sheds, it was still successful. I took nearly 100 photos for my reference library - and I can already see a few great Mule Deer paintings coming from some of these pics!

Had to pull over for this sunrise - nothing better than waking up in time to see it everyday!

This is just a small part of one of the areas I covered, there is a lot of land out there!

This picture shows the severity of the terrain...

This is a painting in progress... its been in progress for close to a year now . I actually started this painting, got 1/3 of the way done and didn't like it, so I threw it away and started over! Now, I'm getting really close to finishing it and am getting excited! Its titled "Guts-n-Glory" and it depicts that rare occurance where the boss hog buck makes his mistake of challenging the less dominant buck that is escorting the does, and the bowhunter is about to make him pay.

We just received a little over 4" of snow this past week, and while my boys are excited for their first big shed hunting year - they don't mind the snow hanging around for a bit longer! Last night we decided to make a snowman - it was a little harder than we thought it would be. The snow wasn't as wet as you need it to be, so when we tried to roll the snow up into balls, it fell apart. Plan B... we used a small garbage can and packed the snow in there, kinda like sand castles. Needless to say, it was dark before we finished, but now we have the only snowman on the block!

Brian, John and I have been working together for awhile now to design a new hompage for IowaDeer.com. Now that the forum has a new look, we went ahead and uploaded the new homepage today! Its very exciting for me to get to work with these guys and we all hope you enjoy the new site. One of the new features is; Sneak Peaks - will show the most recent forum posts and photo uploads. This is not quite working yet, but hope to have it operational soon!

Let us know what you think!

I have many passions in life, one of them is Wildlife Art... it is a passion that consumes most of my life beyond work, hunting, and my boys. And it is a passion that I hope to make a career of someday. I have a blog and a website for my artwork already, but from time to time I'll post new artwork on this blog.

The first one is this pair of Wood Ducks that is being sent in today for a duck stamp contest entry. I don't want to say too much about it as the contest has yet to take place... and I won't say what state duck stamp contest this is for... but it is getting sent to Des Moines! (hint, hint) Wish me luck.