Iowa’s pheasant harvest gains amid habitat loss

Because of harsh winters and a loss of habitat, Iowa’s estimated pheasant harvest is only about 60 percent of what it was nearly a quarter of a century ago — and while it ticked up in 2023, the land set aside for conservation where pheasants nest did not.

The annual ritual in Iowa starts Oct. 26 this year, when licensed hunters are allowed to bag three rooster pheasants a day until the season ends Jan. 10.

Not only has the estimated number of pheasants in Iowa declined over the years, the number of hunters has dropped along with it. Between 2007 and 2013, the estimated number of licensed pheasant hunters dropped from 109,000 to 40,000, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’s annual small game survey.

But by 2023, it rose dramatically to about 83,600 hunters. In fact, the pheasant season last fall was the best in 16 years, according to the Iowa DNR, when over 590,000 rooster pheasants were harvested. The state attributed the uptick to both a strong pheasant population and more hunters.

“We were trending back up and I think that's just partly because hunters are seeing more birds through time and the word is getting out to non-resident hunters that our hunting is kind of coming back a little bit,” said Todd Bogenschutz, an upland wildlife biologist with the Iowa DNR.

“I think it's just kind of a response to better populations,” he said. “Hunter numbers do tend to follow what the population does.”

But to get back to the 1-million pheasant harvest season the state saw years ago, there would need to be a reversal in landowners earmarking less and less land for conservation, Bogenschutz said.

Hitting that mark again would mean adding the equivalent of about 390 square miles of conservation land or similar habitat, he said. That is like adding land about the size of Iowa’s smallest county by area — Dickinson, at 381 square miles.

‘Back-to-back’ bad winters

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Years before he was able to a shoot a gun, Terry Haindfield, then 12, would tag along with his father and older brothers when they would go pheasant hunting. Haindfield, now 65, started hunting pheasants on his own at 16 in Woodbury County, along the Missouri River.

“I’ve always found pheasants to be a fun recreation venture,” said Haindfield, a retired wildlife technician and wildlife biologist with the Iowa DNR.

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Although he said he can’t pinpoint when the pheasant population started to plunge in Iowa, Haindfield experienced the loss firsthand.

“We most certainly did experience that really drop in pheasants just due to weather, both weather and habitat conditions,” Haindfield, who is also a board member with the Pheasants Forever chapter in Winneshiek County, where he lives now. The nonprofit works to conserve wildlife for ground nesting birds, like pheasants and quail.

Bogenschutz said the decline has been linked to “back-to-back bad winters” Iowa faced between 2007 and 2012, which brought 30 to 50 inches of snow and wet springs per year, resulting in poor hen survival. He said Iowa’s yearly snowfall average is about 25 inches.

It “was kind of unprecedented for us,” Bogenschutz said. “Mother Nature really drove the population down.”

Pheasant habitat declines

Dry conditions are beneficial for ground nesting birds like pheasants, which can also include quail, partridges and wild turkeys.

Although researchers are still unsure why, pheasants have had better survival and hatch rates in dry conditions instead of wet, Bogenschutz said. One reason for this, he said, is that pheasants give off a stronger scent went they are wet — making them more vulnerable to natural predators.

With drought conditions and mild winters in recent years, pheasant survival and nesting success among the birds has been stronger.

But still, Iowa has lost “a lot” of the habitat that helps foster a healthy pheasant population, Bogenschutz said.

“We don't have the habitat to produce the birds that we had in 2000, but Mother Nature has cooperated with us, and that has helped,” he said.

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Bogenschutz said a “really big factor” in the current state of pheasants’ natural habitat is linked to the changes with the federal Conservation Reserve Program throughout the last several years.

According to the Iowa office of the U.S. Farm Service Agency, the number of acres in the state enrolled with the program has dropped from 1.8 million in 2001 to 1.6 million in 2023.

“Our populations have slowly recovered from the catastrophic 2007 to 2011 weather, as has harvest, but unfortunately our CRP habitat is declining,” Bogenschutz said. “It's pretty straight forward for pheasants: want more, they need more habitat.”

The program is a land conservation effort administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency branch. The program pays farmers who volunteer for it a yearly rental fee in exchange for keeping environmentally sensitive land from agricultural production.

But over the past few years, changes to the program have made it harder for farmers to re-enroll their land, and Congress has lowered the number of acres that can be put in the program. The new farm bill is currently stalled on Capitol Hill.

“In the early 2000s when we harvested 1 million roosters, we had about 1.9 million acres of CRP (and) today we have 1.65 million acres,” Bogenschutz said.

Bogenschutz said that federal conservation program has capped the payments at $300 per acre, but much of Iowa’s land is worth more — resulting in landowners losing money over the deal. Because of that, Bogenschutz said, Iowa has been losing the land since many farmers can’t take the financial hit.

Besides the land in the federal program, pheasants also use small grain and hay fields as habitats in Iowa, Bogenschutz said. Between the three types, the state has lost over a thousand square miles of pheasant habitat since 2000, he said.

Lexi Ashbrook, the regional field representative for Eastern Iowa with Pheasants Forever, an organization founded in 1982 with about 95 local chapters throughout the state, said the local chapters for the nonprofit play a large role in protecting and helping supply habitat.

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Ashbrook said Pheasants Forever helps landowners who are trying to enroll with the federal program by providing native seeds. The organization also helps landowners start other pollinator projects, educates the community through event programming and helps contribute to the “Iowa State Conservation Delivery team.”

The team includes the Pheasants Forever state coordinator, precision agriculture and conservation specialists and biologists.

Ashbrook said Pheasants Forever’s biologist team is spread out throughout the state to assist with conservation projects. The biologists can help landowners manage their habitat and navigate financial assistance at federal, state and local levels. Ashbrook said the biologists also host workshops and field days across the state.

“Our farm bill biologist team last year had impacted almost 50,000 acres of habitat,” Ashbrook said. “If it weren’t for our Pheasants Forever chapters doing local habitat projects in their counties … I don’t think it would have been as successful.”

Pheasants Forever’s “farm bill” biologist team is called that because a significant component of its work is helping farmers and landowners meet their property's goals under the farm bill.

Josh Divan, the Iowa coordinator with Pheasants Forever, said not enough people know about the Conservation Reserve Program and that nearly half the land in Iowa that is enrolled might be lost when the landowners’ contacts for that acreage expire in 2027.

“We’re right on the edge of a cliff,” Divan said.

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“I'd say it is the most significant conservation program that we have here in Iowa, and it's critically important to help keep wild, healthy populations of wildlife across the landscape,” Divan said.

Olivia Cohen covers energy and environment for The Gazette and is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.

Comments: (319) 398-8370; olivia.cohen@thegazette.com