Never had a 60's pheasant experience but do remember several 30 plus covey days in the same era. My home farm had seven or eight distinct coveys. We kept three for dog training only, i. e. we never killed more than two or three birds a year out of those.
Back then there were many fallow fields, weed fields which almost all had one or more coveys and anyone could hunt them. Fields had weedy margins, ditches had narrow strips of trees and brush. I use to walk out my back door and go from farm to farm, weed field to cut over timber and could hunt for three miles in one direction and almost five in the other. Just a boy, a pointer or setter, my 28 ga. Model 12 and a pocket full of shells. If I got hungry I could eat a few turnips as snacks. Life from many viewpoints was as good as it could get and we never knew it at the time.
A few years later we started clearing all the ditches of trees, weeds and brush. Edge cover was gone forever. Weeds were for the most part killed by spraying herbicides. Crops went from truck farming, mixed grains, pasture, fallow fields for soil bank. All were planted and entire farm went in corn or beans. You could look a mile in any direction and not see one speck of cover. No wonder quail numbers collapsed. Mono farming was short term profitable but long term devestating to game. And like many farmers at the time we thought we had to do it. Now I've spent 20 years reversing what we did in five years.
