doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Slightly OT Any birds left in western SD

I really think it is just this years waether... We have a fantastic hunt two years out of Pere, SD.

Jerry

Jerry,

The problems started with the weather, we have had three killer winters in a row now, but the weather impact has been worsen by all the habitat that has been ripped out, plowed under, bulldozed over or drained. Do not confuse the bird numbers on the pay to play operations where the state requires the operators to release minimum numbers, with what is happening to the pheasant numbers in SD or the SW corner of ND.

When the habitat goes, so do the birds. CRP coming out of the contracts last year and this and ethanol has done more harm to the bird numbers than the weather.

It's all about quality habitat as RCC says.
I remember standing next to a winter wheat field one late fall. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing taller than 3".
Winter was coming to this part of the prairie and my friend was blaming the low pheasant numbers on coyotes and hawks.
The CRP was cut for livestock, the playas were drained for extra crop production, the roadsides were mowed, and he still blamed the losses on predators.
While I agree they take some birds, there was no place for them to escape in what looked like hundreds of square miles of lawn. Winter would kill what remained.
Yes, the dry conditions that we are experiencing in the West are making it difficult for critters and people alike. But the combination of drought, predation, and a lack of suitable habitat, are hammering wild bird population out here in the western US.
It's a complex system that involves numerous factors including adequate moisture (at the right time) and quality undisturbed habitat. Just whacking coyotes isn't the answer in the long run.

Funny how "The Answer" in matters of nature just isn't ever simple. It's NEVER "just one thing."

IMO, predation just doesn't dump an otherwise healthy population to very low numbers, not human hunting or natural hunters. Wild birds know how to survive predators. Housing tracts, "clean farming," and long periods of drought are just too big for them to handle, tho.

I have homes in Mt and SD, as well as holdings in ND. I hunt across all three from the first of Sept until the end of the season in SD which is usually the first Sunday in January.

The changes in habitat that I see and hunt now, are staggering.

Between no favorable farm bill for Conservation and the impact of every farmer planting substantial holdings in corn for Ethanol, the mind blowing days of hundred bird flushes are now near an end. As more ethanol plants are being built, like the one in Spirit wood ND, farmers who traditionally were not corn farmers are changing over.

To maximize their returns, they are draining sloughs, bulldozing shelter belts and plowing CRP.

I can't tell you how sad or ugly it is to see bulldozers pushing over hundred year old shelter belts and with their destruction, more wildlife than just pheasants are left exposed to the elements. Additionally, stretches of highways that were kept free from snow drifts by the shelter belts are now often impassable for some time with each storm that rolls across the prairie.

I am just telling it to you the way it is, for it is what it is, but the High Plains are becoming unrecognizable for what they were as little as 5 or six years ago. And the bird population that they supported is now gone or on the way out.

I wait anxiously for word out of Pierre on how the state will react to all this, as they have developed pheasant hunting into a really big business over the last two decades. I want to believe that they will not allow that revenue to dry up and will become pro active for perpetuating bird population, if not as great as in years past, at least much greater than their numbers have dropped off in the last three or four years.

Aggggggggggh!!!!

Man oh man, reading this thread made this northeasterner sad. The midwest and west has always been envisioned as bird heaven to me. To read about all the different factors affecting the bird population is tough.

RCC, your lines about watching bulldozers plow through hundred year old cover was heartbreaking, for you to actually see it must be tragic.

Call me, well, you could call me lots of things but please nothing worse than an ostrich with its head in the sand, but I had no idea that ethanol was getting to be so important as to be such a force of change to farmers' minds and land holdings. Of course, as you point out "no favorable farm bill for Conservation" creates its own impact as well.

This whole country is going ass over tea kettle.

K.Kid,

Ethanol is one of the government's sweethearts and it was made all the more obvious around here last week.

For about three years now, three grades of ethanol mixed gasoline and one grade of unleaded gasoline was available at every pump. The price penalty for not buying the lowest grade ethanol was about 3 cents. Few bought it because on a 20 gallon tank, the 60 cents savings was lost in the poorer mileage.

Last week the 87 octane gasoline was removed from the choices and replaced with a 91 octane unleaded gasoline. The 20 cent jump in price over the 87 octane makes it more expensive than the ethanol blend.

As long as the farmer can sell all the corn he can grow and sell it for 4 to 6 dollar plus per bushel, he will. And as long as the government is involved with ethanol, corn will be grown at the expense of everything else.

We are being manipulated to boast the sales of ethanol because the government needs to justify it's ridicules argument that it is a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

Add wind turbines that are blighting entire landscapes to that list. And when the wind doesn't blow.......

Why not say it, gentlemen: ethanol is a fraud on the public.