(Back not so many years ago, we used to shoot more birds in IA than they did in SD--and IA doesn't have any big lodges or outfitters. If the habitat is there and the weather breaks right, pheasant numbers can increase very quickly. CRP was first authorized in 1985. By 1987, the pheasant harvest in Iowa was 1.5 million, which was twice what it had been in 1984.)

Thanks Larry!

You made my point exactly. It's all about the habitat. Your also correct in, It's also about the wheather. Bad winters combined with the wrong kind of spring & summer can affect birds numbers dramatically as well. We all have proof of that this year by seeing how the dry weather has affected things. Good quality habitat can soften the affects of weather as we all know.

Question Larry: Why doesn't Iowa still harvest over a million birds a year or out-pace SD today?

I'll answer it for you. It's simple, The loss of CRP acreage, or put another way, the loss of quality habitat.

All states are suffering from the same loss of CRP. The difference in South Dakota is the commercial operations that recognize the value of quality habitat and the raising & releasing thousands of birds into it every year.


As far as the dog thing goes. Human nature takes over in most cases. When the average person antisipates a trip to a place like SD for the opener & has done all the planning, travel, etc. I can assure you that most guy's will hunt thier dogs even if it was 100f at noon on opening day. All I'm saying is it would be better to start earlier in the day, before the heat really set's in.

I've hunted prairie grouse myself several times on the opening week of the grouse season in SD. One year it was over a hundred degrees each day & it would get in the high eighties by 8am. That year you could only hunt your dog's safely for the first two hours after sunrise & even then you had to really watch your dog's and keep them hydrated while you had them on the ground.

I know I'm tilting at windmills when I talk about SD's pheasant hunting hours. But I do still have my opinions about it and those are based on years of hunting most of the western/ mis-western upland bird hunting states. I still say "South Dakota's rules are goofy" for a lot of different reasons!