Tossing and turning into pheasant season

For more than 60 years I have been resigned to a poor night’s sleep on the eve of the last Saturday in October.

Like a child on Christmas Eve, bedeviled by visions of dancing sugarplums (whatever they are), I toss and turn, my restless mind replaying scenes from previous pheasant season opening days — cackling roosters, beating wings, heroic dogs, orange-clad hunters, amber fields lit by the low-slanting rays of autumn sun.

My memories go back to the mid 1960s when Iowa consisted of small fields of short, weedy corn ringed by brushy fence rows, flanked by oat and hay fields, interspersed with undrained and unfarmable sloughs — all of it teeming with pheasants.

Department of Natural Resources statistics back me up on that.

DNR August roadside counts, the best predictor of pheasant abundance, began in 1962 with a statewide average of 61.1 birds per 30-mile route and averaged 58.6 birds per route during the 1960s. In northeast Iowa, where I do most of my pheasant hunting, the initial index was 90 and the decade average was 71.1.

Those roadside counts translated into annual harvest statistics generally above the 1.5 million mark and frequently easy three-bird bag limits for me and my hunting buddies.

Enough nostalgia. Farming changed. Fields and farm equipment got bigger. Sloughs got drained. Brushy fence rows got grubbed. Weeds got sprayed. Oats, hay and pasture got supplanted by more corn and soybeans. Pheasants got scarcer. Hunting got harder.

This year’s statewide pheasant index — 19.6 birds per route — is less than a third of the initial index in 1962, but it still is good news for hunters.

It is nearly identical to last year’s index of 20.1 birds per route, which translated to a harvest of 373,000 roosters, and it is 11 percent above the 10-year trend (17.7 birds per route).

Given this year’s statewide index, Iowa pheasant hunters should harvest from 300,000 to 400,000 roosters this fall, according to Todd Bogenschutz, the DNR’s upland game biologist.

Bogenschutz said opening day hunters will benefit from an earlier than average corn harvest, which deprives fleeing roosters of their favorite refuge. As of Monday, the corn harvest was 59 percent complete, one day ahead of last year and eight days ahead of the average.

Pheasant hunting may have gotten harder, but it has not gotten less fun. Nor has it gotten any easier to sleep on the eve of opening day.

I have to no avail tried meditation and self-medication. Repeating a mantra could not clear my mind of pesky pheasant hunting thoughts and images. Nor could staying up until the taverns close, though it shortened the wait for morning.

I also have tried protracted physical exertion, which caused my muscles to ache as I tossed and turned.

Though I will never be well rested on opening day, there will, I hope, always be enough adrenaline-triggering rooster flushes to dispel the morning grogginess and keep me alert until the sun goes down.