In Iowa: Happy birthday

I'm looking forward to my birthday later this month not because it's my birthday, which I usually spend working and handing out Halloween candy (hold the mask jokes, please, I've heard them all), but because it is the opening day of my 52nd Iowa pheasant hunting season.

Not that the 52nd will be any more special than the preceding 51. Even though I am a little more rickety than I was during my first opening day, and even though the part of Iowa in which I hunt has less than a 10th the pheasants it had then, I still anticipate to the point of sleeplessness on the preceding night the prospect of an opening-day rooster lifting off like a helicopter from nearby cover.

Nothing in my experience opens the adrenaline floodgates like the outraged cack-cack-cack and the three-wingbeats-per-second thrum of a suddenly rousted rooster.

Nothing, unless it's the acceleration-distorted bird itself, its red eye patch, white neck ring, yellow beak and barred, streaming tail feathers snapping in and out of focus in a seemingly pixilated image more faithfully rendered by a cubist painting than by a photograph.

Those sights and sounds still weaken my knees, just as they did during my first pheasant hunting season in 1962, when I was a freshman in high school.

Things were different in 1962, said the old timer reflecting on the glory days of his youth.

In 1962, Iowa farms were half the size of today's farms, and of course there were twice as many of them. The typical farm consisted of crop fields, on which farmers rotated corn, hay and oats, and pasture, on which they grazed cattle.

All of it provided good habitat for pheasants, even the picked cornfields, which in those days, before the universal adoption of herbicide and the advent of fodder-shredding combines, consisted of bent stalks often interspersed with annual weeds.

Fences grown up with weeds and brush encircled almost every field, and many of those fields contained undrained low spots, too wet to farm - 'sloughs,” we called them - which grew up each year to cattails and horse weeds.

In 1962, the Department of Natural Resources's August roadside count, the key indicator of pheasant population density, registered a statewide index of 65.9 pheasants per 30 mile route. In northeast Iowa, the region in which I hunt, the index was an astronomical 85.3.

In the years since, both the statewide and northeast Iowa indexes have exceeded their 1962 marks just three times.

In those days a rural road driver commonly saw pheasants running and flying across those thoroughfares in the mornings and evenings, and with the same three-bird limit in effect then as now, hunting outings seldom lasted half a day.

On opening day, hordes of orange-clad hunters vied to see who could get back first to the tavern with their limits.

Now the sloughs have all been tiled, the fence rows have been grubbed, oats and hay have gone the way of the work horse and weedless fields of corn and soybeans stretch to the horizon.

From 1990 to 2013, the state lost 1.85 million acres (or 40 percent) of its upland habitat, according to the DNR. That encompasses a 41 percent reduction in hay acreage, a 96 percent reduction in small grain acreage and a 22 percent reduction in Conservation Reserve Program grassland acreage.

Not surprisingly nor coincidentally, pheasant numbers have plummeted, collateral damage in the march toward increased agricultural productivity.

The average state roadside count index from 2010-2012, the nadir (so far) of Iowa pheasant hunting was 8.4 (about 13 percent of the 1962 index), and the average northeast Iowa index for those years was an abysmal 2.8 (about 3.3 percent of that 1962 index).

With favorable weather the past two years, counts have increased dramatically to 2015 statewide and northeast Iowa indexes, respectively, of 23.95 and 7.47.

Though 'averting the skunk” has long since supplanted 'bagging a limit” in discussions among me and my hunting buddies, half a limit on opening day does not seem unreasonable and would assure my happy birthday.