While I wouldn't wish that I'd shot them all, I sure wish I could say I've been shooting more the last couple years. Last year was my worst season in Iowa since 1988, and that was a bad drought year. All the CRP was mowed, and the dogs had great difficulty scenting anything. Good news back then was that we had a lot more CRP tracts that were large fields rather than stream and field buffers, and we also had a lot more birds. 1989, CRP came back and so did the birds. It's really amazing to look back and compare IA vs SD harvest totals for the 80's and 90's. More often than not, we killed more birds in IA than they did in SD.
The decline started with the 1997 Farm Bill. Because of land values in Iowa (ours is worth a lot more than most land in the states to our west), much of what had been in CRP no longer qualified under the new rules. We did end up with more acres in buffer strips than any other state, but that isn't as good for nesting cover as the bigger fields. (You get a wet spring--and remember, we had record floods in IA in 2008--and nests in stream buffers get drowned out.) We've also had some long, snowy winters. Hard winter and reduced cover, you end up with fewer birds. We need at least a couple years to recover, and even then I think we'll be lucky to see million bird harvests again, regularly, like we did from about 1985 until just a few years ago (with the exception of 2001).
What pheasant hunting we have in Iowa won't be really good for a couple more weeks in most places; maybe more, depending on the harvest. I just drove down I-35 from the MN line to central Iowa, and most of the corn fields haven't even been touched yet. But the weather forecast is good for the next few days, so it'll start coming out.
The other issue we have in Iowa, for nonresidents who don't have local contacts to help them access private ground, is that we do not have a lot of public land. And we don't have a public access to private land program, like SD's WIA's or ND's PLOTS.
To put that 90,000 hunter number in perspective . . . last year, SD had more NONRESIDENT hunters than Iowa had TOTAL hunters. We're already becoming more of a deer/turkey state, and as youngsters grow up not exposed to pheasant hunting, it'll get worse. That being said, the county where I did a Pheasants Forever youth hunt the weekend before the regular season, we had 50 kids in the field. And we did see quite a few birds; almost all the kids at least had some shooting.
Generally speaking, the best pheasant hunting in the state will be from about US 30 north to the MN line and east to I-35. In some other parts of Iowa, bird numbers are extremely low.
