doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com What's with Iowa?

I hadn't consided what Destry mentioned. It could very well be a new pesticide taking ahold. Or we've almost forgotten the last couple bird diseases. West Nile about cleared out all the various city birds around here. There's a fraction of what there was a few yrs ago. The one before that, I have indeed forgotten. Any way you look at it, the numbers appear to have been whittled down.

Think Larry followed the pheasant migration and is in S. Dakota this week. No matter how bad Iowa is for pheasants it's better than Wisconsin, most of our crops still in the field waiting for drying conditions.

I was in NE Iowa for Christmas last year. It was a bust. The weather was brutal and there was far less cover than in years prior. Despite my best efforts I only found one hen, twice. I sincerely hope that the hatch is better this spring and I won't spend another Christmas holiday with the in-laws staring out the window wishing.

I have lived in Blackhawk county, Iowa for the last 47 years and have seen the pheasants dwindle around here for the last 25 or so. The last year I went,1996,I went to Otter Creek marsh with 2800 acres of wonderful habitat and we saw only one bird and 2 sets of tracks. There was 4 inches of fresh snow and tracking would have been easy.Big Marsh north of here was the same. Prime,managed habitat and no birds. I used to take off work every time we had a fresh snow and usually had a limit, or the chance to limit, every time I went. I had no dog and just trailed them in the snow. Very exciting and great exercise in the tall grass and brush thickets. I can remember seeing flocks of,I am serious, 75 or 100 birds with a large percentage of cock birds.No more and my buddy, who is with the state DOT, reports very few sightings and he is out on the roads every day doing maintainence.

DDT in the 30's, 40's & 50's greatly helped to eliminate the Bobwhite Quail population in the South. "When will we ever learn?" Peter, Paul & Mary

George

I have no proof whatsoever, but I have hunted Iowa for pheasants for almost 50 years. I have seen the bad times when livestock ate up to each fence post, the good times with Soil Bank in the 60s and some pretty good times with the government sponsored "diverted acres" a couple of decades ago. We still have a smaller form of the CRP program in place, but in the last 10 years or so I have seen the Iowa pheasant populations decline from what they were. The habitat still looked good. I think those same declining years coincided with the increasing use of genetically altered seeds such as corn. Monsanto and the Roundup Ready products come to mind. Is it possible that these genetically altered seeds, which are designed to be bad for bugs, and other crop pests, are also not conducive to good pheasant and quail populations ? Who "knows" anything about such ?

Pennsylvania pheasant populations took a dramatic decline way back in the late 1970's when the great Pa. Game Commission and their so-called biologists decided we should shoot the hens north of I-80 since they were not breeding anyway. I guess the hens with broods that I frequently saw while groundhog hunting back then were adoptive and/or foster mothers. The very predictable drop in population was blamed on DDT and "clean farming". Well, DDT is long gone... bald eagle, hawk, and other raptors have bounced back dramatically. Clean farming is hit and miss here with many fallow fields and abandoned farms giving plenty of cover for breeding hens. Still no birds. You just can't have baby pheasants when you shoot all the mama's. But just try telling that to the all wise and knowing Pa. Game Commission. Why, their "Decimate the Pheasant" program worked so well that they did the same thing with our deer. Now you can hunt hard and walk many miles in two day old snow without cutting a track in formerly productive areas. Yet the official line by the PGC commissioners is that we still have an overpopulation problem. But they fight the Unified Sportsmen of Pa. at every turn and deny every request for an independant audit. Hopefully the current lawsuit will have its' day in court. By the way, former PGC deer manager Gary Alt didn't end up in Iowa, did he? He'd almost certainly be tarred, feathered, drawn, quartered, and water-boarded if he ever returned here.

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.

In reading Keith's post on Pennsylvania pheasants there are other factors that helped in the decline and most of it was due to the people that run the agency.
Back when Pennsylvania was in the top 10 in pheasant harvest, close to 1.3 million in 1971, and exceeded South Dakota for a year or so. The reason was that the state released chicks at 5-6 weeks of age on land that was not posted. By the time the season came, these birds were almost like wild pheasants. There were times pre-season working the dogs that you would put up 50 or more birds around the Coply- Ironton area outside of Allentown. This lasted until the state stopped the young bird release.
I have read now that the total release is way below the 200,000 and is under 100,000.
The state did start a new program on using either Kansas or South Dakota wild birds and releasing them on special areas with no hunting for a few years. The trouble is these areas are not conducive to pheasants.
It's the same with the Trout fishing, gone bad and is getting worse. I don't hunt deer but have friends that say the deer population is declining also compared to 10 years ago when spot lighting at night and seeing deer in most of the fields.

I can't say if the info from the site is valid or that I agree with the nature of the site but I've heard similar info from several sources and take the info for whatever it may be worth:

http://www.hsus.org/wildlife_abuse/campaigns/pheasants/states_with_pheasant_stocking.html

Kind Regards,

Raimey
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