Outdoors with Larry: Drones for deer

By Phil Cobb | November 25, 2025 |

I have a friend who grew up in Wisconsin who was a very good deer hunter. He liked to bow hunt in early October where large unharvested cornfields stood … his name was Al Narveson. Al had found a good number of big bucks by walking along cornrows into the wind, and coming upon bedding deer deep inside the cornfields. He said that in midday they would hide in those cornrows and you could walk right upon them. I got to thinking about that. Al lives in Arkansas now and it has been many years since he has seen a cornfield. But what a difference today would make on that kind of hunting. Al wouldn’t have to walk through a cornfield, he could just buy a drone and fly it over a field and find the deer in a hurry, pinpointing where he needed to stalk one.

Would drones work in the Ozarks for deer hunters? Well right now with all the foliage left on the trees, probably not, but when the muzzle-loading season arrives you are dealing with bedded down deer during the day and the foliage is gone. Deer would be fairly easy to find with a drone, especially with snow on the ground. I am not sure how to find Al now, but I wonder if he already has figured this drone thing out.

It is amazing how our seasons are changing. Ducks that once lined the Ozark Rivers in early November now come to the Ozarks two to four weeks later than they once did. I keep an eye on Ozark ponds because that tells me when the mallards begin to arrive. Last year they didn’t ‘arrive’ they just pretty well passed us by. This Thanksgiving I will have to watch the situation while I fry a turkey out on the back deck because leaves will be falling in the cooking oil. In 20 years I predict we’ll see the fall foliage at it’s brightest around the first week in December, hurricanes in November, ducks arriving in the Ozarks with the new year, turkeys mating in June and the first tomatoes becoming ripe in July. For the past several years, wild turkey spring mating and egg-laying has been two to three weeks later than it was in the ’80s

I have acquired 17 bound volumes of the Ozark Mountaineer magazine which I will put to good use. They begin in the early 1980s. In my own magazine The Lightnin’ Ridge Journal. I have used some old recipes from a hundred years or so ago that came out of the Mountaineer. In future issues I will reprint material from those old historic issues that tell so much about the Ozarks. My Christmas issue of the Lightnin’ Ridge Journal has just been printed and you can get your own 80-page issue by calling my office at 417-777-5227.

Larry Dablemont is a naturalist and outdoor writer who writes a weekly outdoor column for 30 newspapers in three states. He has worked as a free-lance feature writer for many national magazines and today owns his own publishing company.